Selected letters, 1896-1924 [microform]

The University of Chicago
Library

y

V
V

'y

SELECTED LETTERS

OF
BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL

Photo Sxaitie

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL
SELECTED LETTERS

/ 8 9 6 / 9 2 4

EDITED WITH A MEMOIR

BY
BERNARD HOLLAND

MCMXXVII
LONDON AND TORONTO

J. M. DENT fc? SONS LTD.

NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.

BAROX FRIKDRICH VOX HUGEL

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL

SELECTED LETTERS

/ 8 9 / g 2 4.

EDITED WITH A MEMOIR

BY
BERNARD HOLLAND

MCMXXVII
LONDON AND TORONTO

J. M. DENT fc? SONS LTD.

NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.

'll 'rights reserved

* * *

9 *

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

PAGB

MEMOIR ......... i

APPENDIX I : SOME OF THE SAYINGS OF ABBE" HUVELIN . 57

APPENDIX II : REMARKS MADE BY BARON F. VON HUGEL AT A
MEETING OF THE COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO RELIGION

IN THE ARMY, 1917 ...... 63

APPENDIX III : ROUGH NOTES BY BARONESS HILDEGARD VON

HUGEL ........ 66

NOTE AS TO THE LETTERS . . . . . . 67

THE LETTERS OF BARON VON HUGEL .... 69

INDEX OF CORRESPONDENTS ...... 377

Vll

787327

PREFACE

BERNARD HOLLAND died two months and a week before the time
agreed upon for sending to the publishers the type-written copy of this
book.

The Memoir was completely finished. The Selection of Letters
almost completed ; but both Memoir and Selection of Letters still
needed the correction and the revision which he had in his mind to do.

My beloved husband had spent nearly all the energy of his last eight
months in this life in trying to make this book what it should be. He
had worked beyond his strength, in failing health, and without holidays.
Near Eastertide, thinking the work of selection practically finished, he
was persuaded to take two weeks away abroad. On his return, fresh
letters poured in, and new difficulties arose. In dealing with these,
and in seeing the book through the press, I have had the competent
help of a trusted friend of Baron von Hiigel's, who, however, is not to
be held responsible for the choice of letters to be included.

May the book help many souls towards the Light which the Baron
himself, all his life, sought, and more and more found ; the Light which
daily lit his mind, " warmed " his heart and " braced " his will ; the
Light in which his soul now sees the full Vision of his desire.

" Onde la Vision crescer conviene,
Crescer 1' Ardor che di quella s'accende,
Crescer lo Raggio che da esso viene."

F. HELEN HOLLAND.

October, 1926.

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL

SELECTED LETTERS

18961924

MEMOIR
I

FRIEDRICH VON HTJGEL, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, was born
at Florence on May 8, 1852. Late in life he dedicated a volume of
Essays and Addresses " to the immortal memory of Dante, who died
600 years ago to-day [September 14, 1921], in lively gratitude for
inspiration and support throughout some sixty years of spiritual stress,
from the writer, his fellow Florentine." In 1852 his father, Baron
Carl von Hvigel, was Austrian Minister at the Grand Ducal Court
of Tuscany.

Baron Carl was a remarkable and many-sided man. Born in I795>
he was fifty-seven years old at the birth-date of his eldest son, Friedrich.
His own father was Baron Aloys von Hiigel, of a Rhineland family,
who had entered the Austrian service in 1790. Carl served in the
Austrian army in the campaigns against Napoleon of 1813 and 1814,
including the battle of Leipzig. In 1824 he left the army, and estab-
lished a beautiful home at Hietzing, near Vienna, and studied horti-
culture and natural science. He became engaged to a girl of nineteen,
Countess Melanie Zichy Ferraris, of a noble Hungarian family, but the
marriage was broken off in favour of the famous Prince Metternich,
then fifty-six years old, who married the young lady as his third wife
in January 1831. Seventeen years later, in 1848, it was von Hugel
who enabled old Metternich to escape from Vienna and from the
mob who were clamouring for his life and sacking his palace. Carl
von Hiigel left Hietzing in 1830, a few months before this heart-
breaking marriage, and travelled for six years without a return home.
He visited Egypt, Ceylon, and many parts of India, Australia, New
Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, and finally made a marvellous journey
through the whole length of the highest Himalayas, mostly then unknown
country, from north of Calcutta along the Thibet border to Cashmere.

2 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

He returned to Europe, by way of South Africa, with immense col-
lections of natural and antiquarian and art objects, which eventually
enriched the museums of Vienna, and wrote a large book called
" Cashmere and the Sikh Kingdom " (Kaschmir und das Retch der
Setk), published in 1840. He now again lived at Hietzing, adorning
his " faery-like " gardens with plants raised from Eastern seeds, until
revolution broke out in 1848. He then rejoined the Imperial Army.
" This fulfilment of duty," he wrote later, " made me bid farewell to
the villa built to suit my fancy. There I had hoped to end my days
in tranquil work, surrounded by the great remembrances of my stirring
life, and by the charming witnesses of my wanderings, the plants I had
brought home." But, he says, " what was important was to raise
a barrier against the dissolution of society, to prevent the break up of
all that was great and noble, of all that had been shaped and hallowed
in the course of centuries, that is to say, to serve justice and order in
one word, to serve the Emperor." t

Carl von Hugel served under Prince Windischgraetz north of the
Alps in 1848, and in 1849 in Italy under Marshal Radetzky, the great
soldier, to whom, when all seemed crashing, Grillparzer, the poet,
addressed the heart-stirring phrase, " In thy camp is Austria." After
order and peace had been restored, von Hugel became Austrian Minister
at Florence at the Court of the Grand Duke. Here, in 1851, he
married Elizabeth Farquharson, a Scottish lady, daughter of General
Francis Farquharson, whose acquaintance he had made in India, and
a niece of Sir James Outram. Her father had brought her in 1847,
"a lovely blooming girl of seventeen," x on a visit to Hietzing. She
was affianced to Baron Carl at Verona in the same year, but the marriage
had been deferred owing to the political troubles. She was born in
India in 1830, and was thus thirty- five years younger than her husband.

In 1860 Carl von Hugel published another book, relating to his
travels in the Pacific Ocean. The preface contains a passage which
shows his way of thinking. He says :

" In view of the thoughtless charges of recent travellers, I think it
right to raise a voice in favour of the colonial policy of Spain. For
years, and in all parts of th$ globe, the guest of Englishmen, of that
mighty people whose grand views of life actuate each of its members,
I feel myself deeply indebted to them for friendly reception and help,
without which a part of my travels would have taken double the time,
and a part would have been impossible, and I seize this opportunity
to express my warmest and heartiest thanks. But my judgement with
regard to the success of Spanish institutions in the Philippine Islands
was not to be warped either by my friendship with individual Englishmen,
or by the splendour of the British Colonial Governments. If that
1 Lady Georgiana Fullerton's words.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 3

government is the best for a colony which is the most closely bound up
with the native population ; that government which thinks it important
that the products of the soil should, in the first place, serve for the
sustenance of the natives ; a government which, instead of feverish
money-making, teaches them content ; which is at one with them in
manners and customs, welcomes them as fellow countrymen, as relations,
as brethren, maintains for them peace and quiet, treats them as responsible
beings, considers their claims to joy and happiness, educates them,
ennobles them, and teaches them to believe in the true God . . . then
indeed may Spain point, with proud consciousness, to its Philippines."

Besides Friedrich, born in 1852, two other children were born to
the von Hiigels before they left Florence in 1859 tne Grand Duke
having been overthrown by the Revolution which ended the existence
of Tuscany as a separate State. They were Pauline, who died
unmarried in 1901, and Anatole, who still lives at Cambridge, where
he was for many years Director of the Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology from its beginning in 1883.

In 1860 Carl von Hugel was appointed Austrian Minister at
Brussels, and here the family remained for the next seven years, until
Friedrich was fifteen. Living always at home, in a diplomatic house,
with a father distinguished in science as well as in military and civil
service, he must have seen a great and interesting variety of people ;
and, even after his earliest Tuscan impressions, that flat country had
something to nourish the mind of the observant boy. In one of his late
essays he says :

" When, as a child and lad, I was taken, for our summer holiday
and bathing, from Brussels to Ostend, I used to be impressed, ever more
as the years went by, with how, the nearer we came to the sea and to
its salt landward breezes, the more did the trees bend away from these
blasts. These trees stood there permanently fixed in every kind of
unnatural, fleeing or defiant, attitude and angle. Only after I had
passed these perturbing effects and tolls of the sea, would I reach, and for
weeks and weeks admire, this same wide sea, now found to be in itself
so life-giving and so hospitable a part of the great ocean encompassing
the world. Those trees and that sea have remained with me, for over
half a century, as a vivid image of the effect of the Church be it the
fact of the Church, or the fancies concerning the Church upon large
masses of modern men."

Friedrich's mother, bred a Presbyterian, had become a Catholic
some time after her marriage. He and his brother, as small boys, were
taught by a Protestant lady, a friend of their mother. At Brussels his
tutor was a Lutheran pastor, while general supervision over his education
was exercised by the German Catholic historian, Alfred von Reumont,
then stationed at Brussels as Minister for Prussia. He was never at

4 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

a school or university, and if there are some disadvantages in this, there
was, perhaps, in consequence, in his case, a more free and individualised
flowering of his intellectual and emotional, richly human nature.

Baron Carl von Hiigel, much saddened by the Austro-Prussian
War of 1866 and its results, retired from the diplomatic service in 1867,
and came to live at Torquay. There Friedrich studied geology, for
one thing ; and always, in later life, felt grateful that he had worked
systematically at some branch of natural science, a valuable balancing
corrective, he thought, to purely metaphysical and religious thinking ;
and he kept up interest in it all his life. His guide in this study was
William Pengelly, a Quaker, stonemason and self-taught geologist,
who had made discoveries illuminating the antiquity of man at Kents
Hole, Brixham Cove, etc., in those regions. Mr. Hubert Peate tells
me that in 1922 he heard the Baron talk with enthusiasm of William
Pengelly, and say that it had been a toss-up whether he took lessons
from him or from William Gosse, also of Torquay, and that he was glad
it had not been the latter, from whom he might have received narrower
views of religion in relation to science which, indeed, would seem
probable from Sir Edmund Gosse's well-known book.

In 1870 Baron Carl von Hiigel, now aged seventy-five, was seized
by a longing to see his own delightful country once more, and perhaps
to die there. He passed through London from Torquay on his way
to Vienna, and with great difficulty reached Brussels via Calais, a dying
man. He died there on June 2, and his widow conveyed his body to
the Imperial City by the Danube.

His friend, Baron Alfred von Reumont, wrote of him in a
biographical sketch :

" In him the man of the world was combined with the man of
science ; mature experience of life with profound knowledge of many
fields ; the enjoyment of social pleasures, and the fulfilment of official
duties, with persevering, passionate industry in scientific pursuits. He
was considerate, sympathetic, accessible, humane, without pretention,
and without stiffness. Till middle life notable in salons, he was a loving
husband and father. His deep-seated religious feeling and his attach-
ment to his Church had not a trace of narrowness or intolerance, and his
Christian charity showed itself both in the mildness of his judgments,
and in his beneficence and liberality. He was a warm patriot without
antipathy to other nations ; a decided Conservative without political
intolerance ; in all things full of moderation and equity."

In another sketch his friend, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, an excellent
judge of character, bore witness to his noble and beautiful mind and
nature.

The Baroness Elizabeth survived her husband by forty-three years.
She lived during her later years at Cambridge, and died there in 1913.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 5

She had not the same intellectual interests as her eldest son, but he may
have derived from her a dynamic force, and even a certain " vehemence "
of temper, which in one letter he attributes to himself as in excess, and
needing special self-control.

Soon after his father's death Friedrich von Hugel suffered a bad
attack of typhus, and then began the deafness which gradually increased
in severity, and was so great a trial to him throughout life. He now
spent a year in Vienna, and about this time passed through a religious
crisis. He attributed his salvation from utter infidelity, and perhaps
from the sway of the passions, mainly, under God, to two men one at
Vienna and the other, later, at Paris. In 1920, defending the principle
of sacerdotal celibacy, he said :

" Certainly I know, beyond the possibility of doubt, that 1 myself
could never have been regained by any but a celibate cleric to purity
and to God however much, since I was thus costingly regained,
I may appreciate the beneficence of a married clergy, and however
clearly I may perceive the dangers and drawbacks of too large an extension
of obligatory celibacy. I have constantly before my mind two men to
whom, precisely as such Christian celibates, I owe infinitely much.
The one was a Dutch Dominican Friar, a man of gentle birth and of
great religious experience, who first trained me in the spiritual life in
Vienna, fifty years ago. What a whole man that was ! One with all
the instincts of a man, yet all of them mastered and penetrated through
and through by the love of Christ and of souls ! And the other was
a French Secular Priest, a man of vehement, seething passions, and
of rare forces of mind, whose will of iron, by long heroic submission
to grace, had attained to a splendid tonic tenderness. I owe to this
Frenchman more than to any man I have ever known in the flesh.
Now both these men would have remained incredibly smaller had they
listened to the subtle explainers away of the renunciation, visible as well
as invisible, preached and practised broadcast by the central figures of
the Synoptic Gospels, and if they had settled comfortably into a married
life. Like their great predecessors, Aquinas and St. Francis, they required
the height of celibacy from which to shine and to rain down upon the
just and unjust amidst their dearly loved fellow-men."

The Dutch Dominican was Father Raymond Hocking. The
French priest was the Abbe Huvelin, the well-known spiritual director
in Paris, who died in 1911. The Baron kept notes of his sayings to
him in May 1886. They show the view taken by a deeply experienced
observer of the Baron's character when he was thirty-four years old,
and I have given them as an Appendix to this Memoir.

About the same period, in his " thirties," the Baron used to make
retreats with the Jesuits, and he learned, he says in one of his letters,
things of spiritual value from them, and, no doubt, from the books of

6 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

such men as the Peres Grou, Gratry, and Ravignan. 1 He also acknow-
ledges obligations to " Dr. W. G. Ward, that brilliant Balliol lecturer,
and later fervent, indeed partly extravagant, Roman Catholic, a great
supernaturalist, who first taught me that the Supernatural should not
be directly identified and measured by the amount of its conscious,
explicit references to Christ, or even simply to God, but by certain
qualities of which heroism, with a keen sense of givenness and of
' I could not do otherwise,' appears to be the chief." 2 In another passage
the Baron says, " When that virile thinker, ' Ideal ' Ward, reached
his last earthly years, he came to see clearly, I remember, how, in his
feeling and his writing, he had been too prone to ' unspeakably,'
' incredibly,' and the like." 3 If W. G. Ward had been, in some
respects, a teacher of Friedrich von Hiigel, the latter largely influenced
his less " ultramontane " son, Wilfrid Ward, who, like his father,
edited at one time the Dublin Review.

Friedrich von Hiigel at the age of twenty-one, in 1873, married
Lady Mary Herbert, daughter of Sidney Herbert, created Lord Herbert
of Lea, Gladstone's friend and ministerial colleague, and sister of the
thirteenth Earl of Pembroke. Lady Mary, at the age of eighteen,
followed the example of her mother, and became a Catholic. There
were three beautiful daughters from this marriage Gertrud, Hildegard,
and Thekla. For three or four years the family lived without a
settled home, partly in England and partly abroad, but in 1876 took
a house at Hampstead. In later years the heights of Hampstead did
not suit Lady Mary's health in winter, and from 1893 to 1902 (inclusive)
they spent the colder months at Rome, with shorter stays at Genoa and
elsewhere, except in 1899, when they were at Grasse and Cannes in
the French Riviera from January till May.

In 1903 the von Hiigels moved from Hampstead to the house at
13 Vicarage Gate, near Kensington Gardens, where the Baron spent
the rest of his life. After this migration he rarely went abroad, and
then, except once, only for short expeditions. He did not at all enjoy
travelling for its own sake ; quite the reverse. But during the preceding
years he had made a large number of acquaintanceships, and not a few
real friendships in Italy and France, and certainly had had the time in
which to learn Rome well, and to know both the official clerical circles
and the numerous visitors attracted from other countries to the Eternal
City while the great Leo XIII was Pope. In 1902 he visited
Heidelberg and Jena, and met two non-Catholic thinkers whose writings

1 A correspondent (not a Roman Catholic) tells me that on one occasion, when
he talked with the Baron, the latter said to him with emphasis, " Under God, I owe
my salvation to the Jesuits, but don't you ever have anything to do with them."

z Essays and Addresses, p. 280.

8 Idem, p. 172.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 7

he immensely admired Ernst Troeltsch and Rudolph Eucken. All
through life, if he read any book which much impressed him as that of
an earnest and sincere seeker after truth, he endeavoured to make the
acquaintance of the writer, by letter or meeting. This, and his real
desire to assist even persons of small importance who asked for his advice
or opinion, involved him in a large correspondence with men and
women of various countries, to whom he usually wrote in their own
tongues German, French, Italian, or English and into his letters,
as into all that he did, he put the most minute and conscientious labour.
Thus, with this ever-increasing correspondence and intercourse, and
immense reading and study, and often interrupted by long periods of
always bad and sometimes altogether incapacitating health, he passed
away the years before he had actually begun to write his first book, 1
his physical condition having then improved. This was the preparation
which made him one of the central figures in the stormy period in the
life of the Church, which followed the death of Leo XIII and the
accession of Pius X.

II

In 1897 began Friedrich von Hiigel's resultful friendship with
Father George Tyrrell, S.J. Tyrrell's life has been ably written by
his close friend and adherent, Miss Maude Petre, who also has published
a separate volume of his letters. A certain number of the very many
letters which passed between the Baron and Father Tyrrell between
1897 and Tyrrell's death in 1909 are given in these two books, but these
are but a very small part of the whole correspondence on both sides,
which is still in existence, complete or very nearly so. From notes
left by the Baron he appears to have contemplated the possibility of the
publication at some time after his death of this correspondence, or part
of it, as a separate book, but it is not thought that the time for this has
yet come, if it ever does. The Baron entrusted responsibility as to this
to Professor Edmund Gardner, whom he named as his literary executor.
With his assent some of the letters from the Baron to Father Tyrrell
are published in the present volume, which would indeed have been
most incomplete without them.

George Tyrrell was born in Dublin in 1861, and thus was eight
years younger than the Baron. He belonged to a Protestant family,
but, after a short period of work with Dolling, the famous High Anglican
of the London East End, he entered the Roman Catholic Church, and
after that became a novice in the Society of Jesus. He was ordained
in 1891, and worked on the pastoral mission in Lancashire, and then,

1 The Mystical Element, etc. The first beginning of this book was a study of
St. Catherine of Genoa, intended to be quite short, on which he was working in 1898*

8 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

from 1894 to 1896, held a Chair of Philosophy at Stonyhurst. He
then came to London, Farm Street, and, among other work there,
wrote more constantly than before for the Month, the periodical of the
English Jesuits. He had gone through a period of strong Catholic
orthodoxy and advocacy, affected, towards 1897, by the influence of
Cardinal Newman. In that year he published his book, Nova et
Vetera. This book attracted the attention of the Baron, who was
much pleased by it, and on September 20, 1897, he wrote from
Hampstead to Father Tyrrell and said that he would like to make his
acquaintance. The two had the first of many meetings on October 9.
Just at this time the Baron was anxious about his eldest daughter, the
Baroness Gertrud von Hiigel, then aged a little over twenty. Much
as he loved all three of his daughters, she was the nearest to him through-
out her life in intellectual interests ; he had taken great pains in her
religious-philosophic education, and had endeavoured to build her into
a thought-companion. But, like so many intelligent young men and
women at that period in life, she had fallen, in 1897, into a passing state
of repugnance towards, or revolt from, the teaching and practice and
atmosphere of the Church. She was also in an overwrought condition
of physical nerves, and the doctor had advised that she should have six
months' complete change of environment j she was not therefore to
accompany the family to Rome for the coming winter, but to stay with
relatives in England. The Baron, on October 19, wrote to Father
Tyrrell to ask him to call and make the acquaintance of his daughter,
since he was anxious to bring them into touch, and this was followed by
several visits of Gertrud to Farm Street, to discuss her doubts and feelings
as to religion. In a reassuring report to the Baron, Father Tyrrell
said, among other things :

" She spoke to me very freely and with perfect simplicity about her
mind which is, no doubt, at present in a state of complete muddle about
many things ; and I fancy she was a little needlessly frightened through
not clearly apprehending the difference between difficulties and doubts ;
or between obscurities and negations. I think I reassured her on this
point, and also got her to see that her mind is at present hopelessly
overwrought and incapable of clearness, and that in the very interests
of truth she should rest completely from all questionings at present, and
let the philosophic faculty lie fallow*and recover its tone and energy. . .
" I feel sure you will let me say that, in your enthusiasm and
intensity with regard to all that concerns the Catholic faith and the
cause of truth, and in the natural desire you have to make your daughter
a sharer of all your views and hopes, your very affection seems to blind
you to the fact that, after all, your Gertrud is years and years younger
than you are, and that the fibre of even the best mind at 20 is feeble
compared with that of an equally good mind at 45. Besides which,

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 9

the receptivity of a mind depends largely on the amount of knowledge
already acquired and the extent to which it has sunk into the soil and *
heen woven into the texture of the understanding ; and here again the
inequality between you must always be enormous. But on both sides
affection resents this inequality, and she wants to be, and you want her
to be, in complete mental communion with you. In a word, you
neglect St. Paul's caution against giving to babes the solid food of adults.
The result is indigestion. Things that your formed mind can easily
swallow without any prejudice to simple faith, may really cause much
uneasiness in a mind less prepared. We must give minds time to grow
and feed them suitably to their age. Had I known twenty years ago
things that I know now, I could not have borne them then. If you
want your daughter's company, you must shorten your steps and walk
slowly ; else she will lose her breath in her desire to keep up with you.
Besides, apart from more serious consequences, I suppose all that in-
terferes with perfect liberty and leisure in the formation of our opinions
is an intellectual misfortune, and I think her affection for you may
possibly exert some such bias inclining her to force her mind into
premature agreement with yours.

" I am also inclined to believe that her mind troubles are at the
root of her ill-health. For she does not speculate coldly but with great
intensity of emotion ; nor has she yet that experience which teaches one
to be patient over a difficulty and lay it aside in the certain hope that it
will vanish as our mind grows ; but she rather inclines to persevere in
trying to cope with problems quite above her present powers. This
is what wears the brain tissue and disorders the whole nervous system
not study, nor thought, but worry."

The Baron replied to this letter from Rome on January 26, 1898 :
" I know you will not have interpreted my renewed silence as in
any way a want of agreement with, or of gratitude for, your second
letter, as wise and helpful as both its predecessors. But, besides having
much else to do, and still but little health or heart to do it with, I wanted
to get, if possible, some fresh facts or ideas to put to you, in this matter,
which, you will readily understand, is constantly at least at the back of
my mind, and which grows, in some ways, worse, not, please God, in
itself, but in my mind. I see so increasingly plainly the triple fault and
undermining character of my influence, the dwelling so constantly
and freely on the detailed humanities in the Church ; the drawing out
and giving full edge to religious difficulties ; the making too much of
little intellectual and temperamental differences between myself and
most Catholics, near relations included, so as to seriously weaken such
' influence as they might otherwise have had. Not but that all this was
certainly unintended, unforeseen : the grief and lasting keenness of the
pain is, thank God, a sufficient proof of that ; but if only I had looked

io VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

out against the selfishness of leaning on one whom I ought to have
propped still for many a day ! I have dropped my own child, my
First-born, whom God gave me to carry and to guard. I venture to
come out with a little of what I am feeling in the matter, if only for
this reason, that, whilst I do not feel it would be wise directly to say
much more to G. about my grief and self-reproach, yet it may be well
that you should clearly know my frame of mind in the matter, as she
might possibly take my, thank God quite unforced, gentleness with her,
and entirely undiminished love for her, as somehow indicating no very
deep distress at her loss of light. I have for years felt in general and
in several particular cases, and now feel more than ever in this case,
how entirely a sense of culpability and a sense of loss, misfortune and
danger are distinct : I feel no inclination even to this first, yet the
entire absence of the first leaves quite undimmed and unblunted the
keen consciousness of the second. What I think gives this keen edge
to my feeling, is the anxiety and sort of dull dim consciousness that, for
the moment, she has lost, not simply faith in the Church and even the
fundamental Christian dogma, but (which is surely a further and a still
graver matter) true creatureliness of mind. And yet, as soon as I put
this to myself, I have a joyful uncertainty after all, as to whether her
mind has set on this point. I wrote to her two days ago, and told her
how this moral, humble, creaturely attitude towards God, one's own
ideals, one's own achievements compared with those ideals, one's own
achievements compared with others' achievements, the consciousness
of incompleteness and of failure, of one's life being unlivable without
its being lived co-operatively between the soul and God, how I found
this in several friends who are no Catholics, no historic Christians of
any kind ; and that, as long as she can keep, and by daily practice and
prayer ever. regain this spirit, I can wait so far happily, quite indefinitely,
as I should feel that she keeps in her the germ of full life, and is still
living, in her degree, the one true life, and is still moving in the one true
direction. I am clear that what I have said to her is very true and most
consoling ; there is, for instance, my good friend Professor Eucken of
Jena (How I wish you read German, so as to read him), how deeply
creaturely his tone is ; in moral disposition and view of life he is
a Christian, though clearly stating and illustrating his non-acceptance
of all dogma. I find it very hard to believe that even now, I mean
before any reaction can be looked for, she has lost all such creatureliness,
though irritation and what not may for the moment obscure it. I know
that Abbe Huvelin (I have written to him now, but have not yet heard)
used to say, that many might think G.'s troubles came from simple pride ;
but that he found her very simple and often sweetly humble. If God
preserves her that, even though hidden to herself and others, her face is
turned in the right direction. I take it though that the spirit I mean

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL n

cannot but suffer, for a while at least, under such a change, even though
such a change need not have been preceded by the complete loss of that
spirit ; for I note with sadness that she seems turned, for the moment,
away from moralism and spirituality, however general, however vague,
to intellectualism, or even simple agstheticism. But that does not accord
with her apparently unweakened simplicity ; love of her little sister ;
attraction, still apparently, for such a tone as Pere Grou's. Indeed,
I am much struck at how quite recently still she was consulting me as
to how and what books of his to get friends to read and work into their
lives : for it is just this love of this childlike, creaturely spirit of Grou's
which I feel to be the fine four of Christianity and of the Church, and
an utterly supernatural, costing, unobvious spirit and life ; and that,
as long as I love it thus, I could not, if I tried, get further away from
Christianity and the Church than, say, Eucken.

" I hope much, somehow, and I think I see some signs of it, that
at all events the marked craving for excitement is now less, although
I quite see the danger of its waking up, perhaps suddenly, if her con-
victions were, by continuing to decay, to cease furnishing sufficient
food for heart and life. But her deep love of books and of her friends,
and wish to help others will, surely, come in usefully here. She is so
anxious to make herself useful in Cambridge : that is the kind of thing
I know Abbe H. worked hard to keep going, the feeling and its
opportunity of exercise.

" I am so deeply grateful to God and to him and to you, and that
you two are at one, entirely, about her.

" I need not say, how grateful I shall be at all times for any criticism
of this or any other letter, or for news of any sufficiently marked and
communicable change in her, to the right. or left. I do so trust, she
may not come to giving up going to Church, or keeping up with you.

" I am, dear Father Tyrrell, with life-long gratitude,

" Yours very sincerely,

" FR. VON HUGEL."

In his reply, dated February 16, 1898, Father Tyrrell wrote :

" I was sorry to gather from your letter that you were fretting about
Gertrud ; and by ' fretting ' I mean chafing over mistakes made in the
past in all good faith, such as the wisest and best of us must often make ;
which no amount of fretting will remedy, but only quiet trust in God
Who turns our blunders to greater eventual gain than our skill would
ever effect. It was your anxiety to secure a clear-sighted faith, that
would fear no facts, and need no blinding, that would not be scandalised
to find heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, and men rather than angels
the ministers of the Gospel, it was your desire to secure this for her that
led you, as you say, to emphasise the human side of the Church too exclu-

12 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

sively, and to forget that the other side, which was so apparent to your
own mind, had not yet seized hold of the younger mind with strength
enough to make the former but as a cloud which passes before the sun. I
daresay the same thing may have to some extent impeded your good work
in other quarters by gaining you a distrust with many whose orthodoxy
needs to be protected by a husk of narrowness ; and who do not know
you well enough to understand that it is just because your faith is so
much stronger than theirs that you can afford to make so many con-
cessions, to allow the existence of so many adverse facts and difficulties.
A man who stands on firm ground can enjoy a freedom of movement
impossible on a tight-rope. Still I believe he may very easily slip into
scandalum pusillorum ; by becoming intolerant of intolerance, and narrow
about narrowness, forgetting that thought, i.e. really independent thought,
is trusted by God to the few for the sake of the many. Of course in
our days we have also to guard against the scandal of the intelligent and
cultured, so that we need discretion on every side ; and are bound to
fail often."

The fine mind of Gertrud von Hugel" recovered in time from this
passing overthrow of religion. Continually contending against most
distressing illness, she lived in many ways an heroic life, and died in 1915
as a true Catholic, and like a saint.

It would have been well for Father TyrrelPs happiness, and for his
influence for good in the Catholic Church, if he had been able to follow
to the end in his own case the wise advice which in the closing sentences
of his last quoted letter he gave to the Baron. But perhaps the Baron
himself, conceiving immense admiration for TyrrelPs intellect, guided
that swift and impatient mind too rapidly into the thought-environment
which had now long for himself been the element in which he lived
and moved with the security of a native. He made Tyrrell learn
German, and introduced him to the works of the modern religious
philosophy writers of that nation. He not only led him to study the
books of French Modernists, like Loisy, Blondel and others, but placed
him in personal intercourse with his own friends in France and Italy.
He circulated Father TyrrelPs writings to such friends, and tried to
arrange for translations of them into French and Italian. It was most
characteristic of him that, if he found any good thing for himself, he was
anxious to impart it to others, and to bring together men who thought
alike. In this way he no doubt did much, with the best intentions, to
accelerate a situation which had tragic consequences, although it may
have, we may trust, beneficial results in the long run for the Catholic
Church.

Already, in 1899, Father Tyrrell wrote to the Baron : " I cannot
tell you the strong developing influence your friendship has exerted
on my mind ; in how many cases it has determined me at points of

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 13

bifurcation to choose this road rather than that, and all with the happy
result of making my mind more of a Jerusalem, i.e. a city at unity with

itself."

Yet the alliance of Friedrich von Hugel and George Tyrrell was
that of two minds, the German-Scottish and the Anglo-Irish, of very
different kinds and range. The Baron's mind was laborious, many-side-
regarding, fully weighing, slow-moving, deep ploughing. He thought
and wrote slowly and with difficulty, writing and rewriting, and again
rewriting, and qualifying, because so anxious not to overstate or under-
state his case, and to see what could be said both for and against every
position, with the aim of arriving at the most exact possible truth.
" A Frenchman," says Madame de Stael, " can still speak when he has
no ideas ; a German has always in his head rather more than he can
express." This very Germanic mental attitude makes impossible an
easy, flowing or rhetorical style, and it is not possible fully and rightly
to understand anything that he wrote without giving close attention.
Father Tyrrell, in a letter to him of March 20, 1904, says :

" Your paper on ' Official Authority ' requires awful concentration
of attention. For you, each word is chosen and placed with full explicit
consciousness and meaning. But what audience will appreciate that ?
Not even the Cherubim and Seraphim. I think you might consider
the average mind a little more. It was the same with your most won-
derful Synthetic paper, which you stuffed like a tight sausage. Solid,
liquid, gas are the three forms in which thought can be presented ;
the last for an audience, the second for a book, the first for an Archangel

in retreat."

In his later years the Baron's style became more liquid. Eternal
Life is easier reading than the Mystical Element, and the later volume,
Essays and Addresses, is easiest of all. It was good for him to address
in speech audiences not too deeply educated, to whom he had to
make himself intelligible. It was never difficult to follow him when
he talked, but, with pen in hand, correcting and recorrecting, with the
aim of getting at the finest shade possible of truth, he easily became, if
not obscure, yet difficult to read without an unusual and sustained effort
of attention, which, indeed, brought its reward to the reader in making
him think, and so remember. The Baron was very conscious of this,
and often asked friends to point out the places in drafts where his style
was, as he said, too Germanic. He evidently often thought in German
as he wrote. He not only had, by descent, the " German Soul," but,
as he once said in a letter, quite seven-tenths of his reading had been in
German. He gave such close and conscientious attention to every-
thing he did that he could only do, to his satisfaction, one thing at a time.
In a letter to his German friend, Dr. F. Heiler, he said that writing
letters had always been a difficult and laborious thing for him, and had

i 4 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

seriously interrupted his book-writing. He once expressed to Father
Tyrrell his amazement that the latter could read and write so much all
at the same time, and said that he himself, when he was writing, read
very little, except what was directly necessary for the book in hand.
Three or four hours of working at the book was all that he could manage
in the day ; the rest must be given to being out of doors, and relaxation
of the mental bow.

George Tyrrell was the Baron's exact opposite in these respects.
He was a born writer and fighter. Whole sentences and paragraphs
and chapters rose rapidly from below the surface, and pressed for public
utterance, like children in haste to be born. The Baron once said of
him, " Most men are more cautious in writing than in private conversa-
tion, but with Father Tyrrell it was just the reverse." Tyrrell, in
conversation, struck people who came across him as rather humble and
modest in manner, but with pen in hand, in a letter, or in public writing,
especially when at last he was quite free from the restraint imposed
by the Society to which he belonged, he was almost too effective and
trenchant. The ease, lucidity, and fluency of his style, which made
him an excellent letter-writer, made him also a controversialist of
the first capacity. In making a deadly point he had the wounding
skill of a master of the rapier. He recalls the Pascal of the Lettres
Provinciates. Also he had abundant wit and humour, and, perhaps,
a certain subconscious love of warfare for its own sake. He was a
creature of moods, too, over-despondencies alternating with over-
exaltations. His friendship with Friedrich von Hugel and others shows
him to have been the most lovable and human character. But evidently
he was quite out of place in a Society with so strict a discipline as that
of the Jesuits. The double or treble censorship, which every book
written by a Jesuit has to pass before it can be published, was by itself
enough to drive into despair and revolt a born writer and free-lance
like George Tyrrell. This led him to the practice of pseudonymous
publications, or papers printed for private circulation.

Ill

At the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the present
century the "Modernist Movement" caused agitation, not only in the
Catholic Church centred at Rome, but, more or less, in all other religious
organisations. This far-extending subject cannot be treated at any
length within the brief limits of this Memoir, but readers should,
I think, be reminded of the main events with which Friedrich von Hugel
was intimately concerned.

In one sense the publication in the eighteenth century of Lessing's
Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts may be said to have inaugurated

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 15

the modernising movement, and subsequent contributions of science
swelled the stream, especially the Darwinian speculations as to modes
of evolution, the results of historical research, and an evolutionary
philosophy applied to history. The all-pervading influence of the
evolution doctrine had this main effect, that, whereas formerly men
had always felt that in religion, at all events, truth in its most perfect
form lay in the past, they were now led to think that the more
perfect, and ever more perfectible, form lay in the future. This view
shook the very foundations of the old-style Protestantism, the belief in
the absolute and final and literal truth of the biblical books. Science
also now proved that many statements in these books, hitherto supposed
to be actual history, were merely early imaginations about the universe,
and critics threw great doubt upon the dates and authorship of most of
them. And in this last respect criticism extended itself to the New
Testament also. Catholicism could stand the storm better than
Protestantism, because, although the Church gave a general guarantee
to these books, it had never rested solely upon them, but upon its divine
foundation, its continuous history, its claim to ever-present living
guidance by the Holy Spirit in interpretation of doctrine. In this sense
the Church always admitted " progress " in the development, or gradual
revelation, from the original " deposit of Faith," explicit statement of
that which was implicit ; but to those who regarded religion as merely
a branch of the natural self-evolution of all things the Church must be
unalterably opposed.

The mind of John Henry Newman had been formed in the pre-
evolution thought-world, and he had never read the German philosophers
who even then followed in the line of Lessing. But no doubt his
sensitive spirit was affected by the ideas in the air when he wrote his
" Essay on Development," intended to justify to himself and others
the existence of the later-explicitated Catholic doctrines and practices
which were only to be discovered in germ in the New Testament and
in the earlier Fathers, and not therefore to be justified either upon the
grounds held in his evangelical youth, or upon those held in his High
Church Anglican days. He pointed out that, if these doctrines and
practices were not to be found except in germ in the New Testament
and earliest writings, neither also were there to be found explicitly
expressed those doctrines later defined at Nicea and Chalcedon and
accepted by all Protestants of his day, and that, indeed, from this absence
the Arians (like the Protestants against later doctrines and cults) had
drawn a powerful argument only to be met by the theory of some kind
of development. Gladstone said at the time that this book of Newman's
(though a crushing reply to Protestant acceptants of the Creeds) placed
Christianity on the edge of a precipice whence a skilful hand might throw
it over. As Newman represented it, the process was one of gradual

1 6 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

unveiling by the inspired Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, as errors
arose and had to be met. But it could also be represented as self-
evolution by a purely natural process, corresponding in the intellectual
world to that of the Darwinian in the material world. Thus, although
Newman carefully distinguished between true and false developments,
and although this was the road into the Catholic Church found by him
and by many others, his theory was regarded with a certain suspicion as
dangerous by the ruling ecclesiastical authorities.

Friedrich von Hiigel, born a Catholic and remote from the Oxford
Movement, had less than Anglicans in common with Cardinal Newman,
but he was at one time, and for a time, much influenced by some of his
writings. He says in the preface to the Mystical Element that the
poem, the Dream of Gerontius, made a profound impression on his
mind. Sometimes in his earlier days he visited the old Cardinal. He
told me that the Cardinal was not easy to talk with, because he was so
very sensitive and easily pained, " like a very refined sensitive old lady."
In 1893 the Baron made his then new friend the Abbe Loisy acquainted
for the first time with Newman's writings. They fell in with, and
accelerated, the line of thought that Loisy was already pursuing. He
says in his book of 1913, Chases passees :

" Je ne lisais pas que les auteurs heterodoxes. Mon excellent ami
ie baron Friedrich von Hiigel me communiqua les ceuvres de Newman,
et je les etudiai longuement. L' esprit de Newman me plaisait beaucoup
plus que celui des theologiens protestants. J'etudiai surtout son Essai
sur le developpement de la doctrine chretienne"

M. Loisy once said that Newman was the greatest, and perhaps the
only great, religious thinker of the nineteenth century. M. Loisy is
not, nor has ever professed to be, a philosopher and poet ; he is a scientific
historian and critic. In 1893, the year when he first knew the Baron,
whose junior he was by five years, he was lecturer, under M. d'Hulst,
at the Institut Catholique at Paris, on Hebrew and Assyriology, and
Bible Study. Just then he fell into trouble with the ecclesiastical
authorities on account of his published essay, La question biblique et
/'inspiration des Ventures, was retired from his post and made chaplain
to a convent and girls' school. This gave him leisure to follow his
natural line of historical criticism. In 1899 he resigned his convent
work, and gave all his time to study and writing, publishing some articles
in the Revue du Clerge franfais, under pseudonyms. In 1901 he
gave a course of lectures at the Ifcole pratique des Hautes Etudes on
" Babylonian Myths and Genesis," and afterwards published this as
a volume, followed by his Religion d' Israel. In October 1902 he was
an active candidate for episcopacy, but almost at the same time published
his two volumes called Etudes evangeliques and UEvangile et I'figlise,
and, he says, felt true relief when his applications for a bishopric failed

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 17

of success. L'fivangi/e et l'gllse raised a storm. This work was
in form a reply to Harnack's recent volume, Das Wesen des Ghristentums
(Leipzig, 1900), from a Catholic point of view, but it was also a free
and bold criticism of the evangelical sources, more radical even than
that of the Berlin Protestant professor. M. Loisy says in his Chases
passees :

" Ma defense de l'glise romaine contre certains jugements du
savant professeur impliquait de mSme 1'abandon des theses absolues
que professe la theologie scolastique touchant 1'institution formelle de
I'figlise et de ses sacrements par le Christ, 1'immutabilite des dogmes
et la nature de 1'autorite" ecclesiastique. Je ne me bornais done pas a
critiquer M. Harnack ; j'insinuais discretement mais reellement une
reTorme essentielle de 1'exegese biblique, de toute la theologie, et mSme
du catholicisme en general."

Loisy, using modern sources of critical and historical information
to which Newman was almost a stranger, extended Newman's carefully
limited theory of development to the whole history of the religion,
before Christ and after Christ, and applied it also to that which is still
to come. He made a distinction, not very easy to draw, and in later
years abandoned by himself, between the province of history dealing with
facts, and that of faith, with its theological or metaphysical interpreta-
tions and formulations. The Church, for instance, might legitimately,
and acting within its province, define the doctrine as to the nature of
Christ, to be held by the faithful, but it was open to the historian to show
how this doctrine, almost invisibly existing in the earliest phase of religion,
was developed stage by stage through four centuries to the final formula-
tion. This was in appearance dissimilar to, though perhaps really
reconcilable with, the orthodox teaching as to the " deposit of faith,"
handed down from the beginning complete, " in gremio ecclesiae" and
gradually revealed, as occasion arose, by the Church authority. Loisy
maintained that everything in the Catholic Church was organically
articulated, as in a tree, from the original vital germ, the actual life of
Jesus Christ, by a natural and legitimate process, and, as against Harnack
and other rationalist or evangelical Protestants, his argument was one
of great power. If the process were vital, and not artificial, those who,
like Harnack, admitted the essence-containing germ, the "Wesen," could
not, as they did in fact, repudiate the tree.

The profoundly learned and deeply Catholic Kenelm Digby, in his
Mores Catholici (bk. viii. p. 249), says :

" There being two classes of truth recognised in Catholic schools,
of which one is the object of science and the other that of faith, there
were necessarily two principles of certainty, one for the truths of
faith, and the other for those of science ; according to the sentence of
St. Augustine, ' quod intelligimus debemus rationi, quod credimus

1 8 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

auctoritati.' What we understand we owe to reason, including all its
modes of application, which is one principle of certainty ; what we
believe, to authority, which is the other. The claims of authority and
of reason to assent were not therefore regarded as antagonistic principles,
but as resting on one and the same principle, rooted in the intellectual
constitution of man, and essential in its duality to the safe and vigorous
action of his mind."

M. Loisy, in his L'vangi/e et I'JSg/ise, kept the way open to
interpretation in this sense, and it seems a pity that he and his book
could not have been left alone by the French Catholic authorities instead
of being hunted into prominence. The matter is of importance here,
because of the intimate connection of these events with the life and
thought of Friedrich von Hugel. Loisy's position at this time was
expressed in his own words : " Catholique j'etais ; Catholique je reste ;
critique j'etais ; critique je reste." One of his school wrote : " Nous
ne disons pas que le Christ n'est pas ressuscite, car nous sommes croyants ;
mais nous serons forces de dire loyalement que le fait de la resurrection
n'est pas historiquement prouve, car il n'est pas." Or, again : " En
acceptant les donnees scientifiques etablies, sans rien conclure contre
ce qui est d'une domaine superieure, celui de la foi, nous pouvons avoir
confiance que nous ne sortirons pas de 1'ordre surnaturel." The
distinction, or relation, maintained, at this time, by Loisy, and by
others, between, on the one side, belief in the purely religious sense,
i.e. real acceptance, on faith, of the dogma formed in and handed down
by the Catholic Church, and, on the other side, the holding facts for true
on scientific and historical grounds (a distinction analogous to, though
not the same as, that very real and very strange relation between poetic
,/truth and literal truth), is one extremely delicate and difficult to state,
and still more to define, and, even if definition is possible, it is dangerous
to say that which may be so easily and harmfully misapprehended by
those who are not practised in thinking or, perhaps, sound in feeling.
This is a justification for careful supervision by those who are responsible
for the general peace and welfare of the Church ; but Loisy's book,
L'vangile et I'^glise, published in November 1902, was surely too
hastily and unreflectively condemned by Cardinal Richard, the aged
and nervous Archbishop of Paris, in a decree dated January 17, 1903,
on the ground that it had been published without an imprimatur, and
also because it was of a nature t;o disturb the faith of the faithful in the
fundamental dogmas of Catholic teaching. Other French bishops
followed this lead. The book was also tried at Rome, but Leo XIII,
in the last months of his life, refused to sign a decree of the Congregation
placing it on the Index. He died on July 20, 1903. Those who
believe in fair freedom for the historian and critic may be allowed to
regret that this relatively tolerant policy of the greatest of modern popes

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 19

was not continued under his successor, so long, at least, as doctrines of
the faith were not formally and expressly assailed or denied.

The Abbe Loisy, however, in the autumn of 1903, after the election
of Pius X, increased his offence by publishing his Autour d'un petit
livre, in which he replied with too much sarcasm and bitterness, and
emphasising his previous positions, to the attacks made by bishops
and others upon L'vangi/e et l'g/ise. On December 17, 1903,
Pius X approved a decree placing on the Index both these books and
three previous ones. Cardinal Merry del Val, in a letter communicating
this decree, said that the " very grave errors with which these volumes
are full, chiefly concern the primitive revelation, the authenticity of
the evangelical facts and teaching, the divinity and the knowledge of
Christ, the resurrection (without doubt also the resurrection of Christ),
the divine institution of the Church and the sacraments."

In March 1904 the Abbe Loisy, however, made (" par esprit
d'obeissance envers le Saint-Siege ") a written condemnation of his
errors condemned by the Authority, which was accepted as, although
not satisfactorily worded, sufficient to ward off, for the time being,
the excommunication even then pending. He lived quietly in the
country, and was allowed until the autumn of 1906 to say Mass in his
own room. In the result of further events narrated in his Chases
passees, he was formally excommunicated in March 1908, laicised
himself, and was appointed by Government to be Professor of the
History of Religions in the College de France.

When Pius X became Pope, in July 1903, he found himself in face
of a tide of " Modernism " which had for a long time been flowing in
increasing volume. In France there were the writings of the Abbe
Loisy, of Marcel Hebert, a distinguished priest and professor at the
Ecole Fenelon, who seceded after publishing in 1902 his daring La
Derniere Idole, etude sur la personnalite divine, 1 Professor E. Le Roy,
Maurice Blondel, the Abbe Houtin, who, after a long virtual secession,
finally laicised himself in 1912, the Pere Laberthonniere, the Oratorian,
the Pere H. Br6mond, once of the Jesuits, but later a secular priest,
Pierre Batiffol, in some degree, Paul Viollet, and others. Monseigneur
Mignot, Bishop of Aix, and finally Archbishop of Albi, gave a certain
amount of support to the Liberal School of writers. In Italy the
movement was led by the priest Romolo Murri, creator of a
" democratic Christian League," and by Antonio Fogazzaro, a dis-
tinguished layman, author of the famous book, // Santo, the Fathers
Genocchi and Semeria, the Counts Scotti, Casati and Alfieri, among
others. The chief leaders in Germany were Franz-Xavier Kraus of
Freiburg and Hermann Schell of Wiirzburg, whose works had been

1 See Un Prftre ymboliste, Marcel Hubert, by Albert Houtin (Paris, 1925), a book
of much interest.

20 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

placed on the Index in 1899. Professor Joseph Sauer of Freiburg and
Karl Muth, editor of the Modernist review, the Hochland, were also
distinguished personalities among the German Catholics who took this
line. All these were thought leaders, but a large number of clergy and
laity were in sympathy with them, more or less.

The Modernists were, naturally, of all shades of temperament.
Archbishop Mignot, for instance, the Abbe d'Hulst, Maurice Blondel,
were cautious and temperate. Monsignor Duchesne, whose earlier
historical writings had started some of the French Modernists on
careers which closed in utter shipwreck, ended himself by combining
a high position at Rome with secular distinction in France as member
of the Academy.

In France a man entirely outside of, but deeply interested in, the
Catholic Church was immensely busy during these years, by correspond-
ence and interview, and by communications to the Press of France,
Italy, and England, in bringing together and stirring up those connected
with the movement. This was M. Paul Sabatier, the Protestant
Calvinist pastor, or ex-pastor, the fortunate expositor of St. Francis of
Assisi the " biggest Colporteur," or go-between, the Baron called him
in one of his letters. It was entirely against M. Sabatier's policy that
any Catholic should secede from the Church. He held the Protestantism
sprung from Luther and Calvin to be an outworn phase of religious
development, with no future at all, but he hoped and believed that
a revolution from within, fostered by himself and others from without,
would destroy the Roman Government and the received tradition. 1

Friedrich von Hugel was in correspondence or personal touch with
all the men above-mentioned in France, Italy, and Germany, and, up
to a certain point, in sympathy with their views. He had become well
known among savants through his paper read at the International
Catholic Congress at Freiburg in 1897, in which he made a complete
exposition of the results of criticism, so far, upon part of the Old Testa-
ment Scriptures. 2 His position in 1903 was nearly the same as that
stated on the face of Loisy's L'fivangile et I'figlise, although there
was a deep-lying difference which, with its results, became apparent as
the lines followed by the two thinkers diverged, and led at last to very
opposite conclusions. He claimed that the means to reconcile actual
knowledge of facts, honestly and freely pursued, with the sublime truths
or realities of the Christian and Catholic religion, did exist, and must,
somehow, be found. He wrote to a friend in June 1903 that :

1 Interesting information as to the role played 1- >v M. Paul Sabatier is given by
M. Albert Houtin in his books, Une Fie de PrStre, pp. 287-299, Un PrStre symboliste,
p. 153, and in his Histoire du Modernisme catholique, pp. 137-141, 158, 209-210, etc.

2 Published later in English and French under title of The Historical Method and
the Documents of the Hexateuch.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 21

" We have to live and to create, not a simple thing, sincere science,
but a complex thing, complex, costly, but consoling, as is all life that is
real and lived . . . sincere science in and with profound and historical
religion, in and with a Catholicism living because always renewed and
re-experimented. Now it is exactly in this combination that lies the
difficulty ; to dedicate one's life to it is that, I believe, which is the
most gloriously devoted and painfully costing thing in the world."

Leo XIII, in his warning Encyclical of 1893 (Providentissimus),
had reproved the new tendencies in the study of Scripture, but, as in
the case of Loisy, had refrained, on the whole, from taking action
against individuals. This policy of forbearance came to an end with
his life. The books of Loisy were condemned in 1904, those of
Paul Viollet, Laberthonniere and Antonio Fogazzaro (// Santo} in
1905. In January 1907 appeared the first number oTthe Modernist
journal, the Rinnovamento, at Milan, on the lines of the existing Demain
of Lyons, founded in 1905. The Rinnovamento was directed by" the
laymen Alfieri, Casati, and Gallarati Scotti, and contributions were
promised by von Hiigel, George Tyrrell, and other leading men in the
movement. The Baron placed much hope in the success of this review,
conducted by men whom he knew personally and esteemed. But on
April 29, 1907, Cardinal Steinhuber, Prefect of the Index, instructed
Cardinal Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan, to call upon the editor to cease
publication of a review " notoriously opposed to the Catholic spirit and
teaching." The Fathers of the Congregation, he said, deplored the
pride with which such writers posed as masters and doctors in the
Church, and regretted to see among them " names already known on
account of other writings animated by the same spirit, such as Fogazzaro,
Tyrrell, von Hiigel, Murri and others." 1

Certainly, the last person in the world who could justly be accused
of pride, arrogance, and vanity, was Friedrich von Hiigel. After
explanations the editors of the Rinnovamento were allowed to continue
for a time, under observation, but before long the publication of this
review, and also of the French Demain, had to be suspended. In May
1907 the Archbishop of Paris interdicted M. Le Roy's book, Dogme
et Critique, and prohibited the clergy from collaborating with the
Revue d'Histoire et de Litterature religieuses. On July 17 appeared
the papal decree known as Lamentabili sane exitu, condemning sixty-five
propositions, drawn for the most part from the works of Loisy, as the

1 M. Loisy wrote on May 12 a letter to Cardinal Steinhuber to protest, and on the
same day began a polemical correspondence in the Univers stating bis conclusions
as to the Gospel narratives in the most radical form. In his copy of Chases passe'es,
on p. 340, where M. Loisy relates this, the Baron has pencilled a marginal note in
French : " Ni Mgr Mignot ni moi n'avons jamais compris cette correspondance
de Loisy avec 1'Univers. Elle m'a beaucoup afflig6 ! C'6tait une action d'ame
amere et dure, chose a pardonner, a oublier, mais qui ne peut pas se justifier."

22 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

main statement of the Modernist views, but striking at the writings of
the whole group, and it was understood that another Roman thunderbolt
was soon to be launched. At the end of August there was a meeting for
a few days* at Molteno, in the Italian Tyrol. Those present were the
Baron von Hiigel, the Senator Fogazzaro, Mgr. Fracassini, the Abbes
Buonaiuti, Brizio, Casciola, Mari, Murri, Piastrelli, the Counts
Gallarati Scotti and Alessandro Casati, friends made by the Baron in his
Roman winters. M. Paul Sabatier, in his book, Les Modernistes, says
of this reunion :

" During three days they exchanged ideas as to action and hopes.
. . . Friedrich von Hiigel was there also, but with his usual humility
he listened, effaced himself. However, on the day of departure he
assembled all the friends into his room, and addressed to them words
at once so simple and so burning that those who had the happiness to
hear them have kept them as the souvenir of one of those moments
when life appears to us at the same time transfigured and yet real, when
we become conscious of the mysterious forces which are within us and
yet dominate and go beyond us. The priest who, lowering his voice
through emotion, described to me this scene some months later, added
that those present thought of St. Paul taking leave of the elders of the
Church of Ephesus."

The Baron himself, in a diary which he kept at the time, enters
this note :

" Thursday 2gth August. Breakfast at 6.30. Made a little
parting speech, reading them Loisy's last letter, and dwelling on the
necessity of sincere, thorough critical work, of deep, self-renouncing
Christian life, of careful charity and magnanimity towards our opponents."

In the same diary he describes one of the company, Piastrelli,
" a young, round blue-eyed, strong-chinned, thin-lipped, crop-haired,
very clean, neat, alert, composed man of 24, in lay dress." This is
characteristic : he always attached importance to the outward appear-
ance, and began thence inwards his observations of character.

A few days later, on September 16, 1907, appeared the Encyclical
of Pius X known as Pascendi Dominid Gregis. The first sentence
affirmed the traditional " Deposit of Faith," which it was the duty of
the Pope to defend against " profane novelties of speech and the contra-
dictions of false science." The Modernists were diagnosed into
philosophers, theologians, historians, critics, apologists, reformers ; and
their various errors were attributed to pride, curiosity, ignorance of
scholastic philosophy. Remedies were then set forth, close study of
that philosophy, exclusion of all teachers tainted with Modernism from
chairs in seminaries and Catholic universities, prohibition of books and
reviews with like tendencies in such seminaries and universities, depriva-
tion of bookshops which sold such of episcopal patronage, exercise by

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 23

bishops of severity in granting imprimaturs, prohibition to the clergy
of taking part in the direction of journals and reviews without episcopal
permission, appointment of censors over each such periodical. It was
also enacted that the bishops should not permit, or very rarely, congresses
of the clergy. To ensure the execution of these measures each bishop
was to institute in his diocese a " Council of Vigilance," which should
meet under his presidency every two months and whose deliberations
should be secret. These Councils were especially not to permit that
those' whom they controlled should speak of " new order of Christian
life, of new doctrines of the Church, of new needs of the Christian soul,
of the new social vocation of the Clergy, of new Christian humanity,
and other new things of this kind."

The Pope also proclaimed his intention, in order " to refute the
calumny that the Church was the enemy of science and progress," to
create a special -Institution, " which should assemble the most illustrious
representatives of science among Catholics, and should have for its
purpose to further, with Catholic truth for light and guide, all that could
be called science and erudition."

This Encyclical brought to its crisis the long-drawn-out affair of
George Tyrrell, the Baron's most intimate friend.

Father TyrrelPs mind, already well prepared for this development,
had been deeply affected by the writings of Loisy, especially by
L'fivangile et I'Eg/ise and the Autour d'un livre, published in 1903 and
1904. He became increasingly and at last most bitterly hostile to the .
principles of the Jesuit Society, to which he had belonged since early youth,
and to the Curialist administration at Rome. He had more than once
expressed formally his desire to resign from the Jesuits and become
a secular priest. At the end of the year 1903 he wrote his anonymous
" Letter to a [fictitious] Catholic Professor of Anthropology " ; it was
printed and a number of copies were privately circulated. The Baron
assisted by placing some among his friends abroad, and thus took the
responsibility of general agreement with the contents. In this letter
Tyrrell suggested a distinction between the collective subconsciousness
of the Populus Dei and the consciously formulated mind and will of the
governing section of the Church, and more than hinted at the necessity
of revolution. " How often," he said, " is revolution the only possible
remedy of bad government based on total miscalculation of the disruptive
forces . . . the ideas, sentiments and tendencies buried in the collective
subconsciousness."

At this time Tyrrell had arrived at more than a half-born conviction
that the course of Liberal Catholicism will run parallel to that of early
Christianity with reference to Judaism, and work as a graft out of, and
not a growth from, the existing Church. It contained, he said, " hetero-
geneous indigestible principles that can never possibly work into one

24 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

system with Ultramontanism, any more than the Gospel of Jesus could
blend with and transfigure the legalism of the Pharisees." 1

In January 1906 one of the recipients of the privately printed
" Letter to a Professor," Fogazzaro apparently, made quotations from
it in the Milanese Corriere della Sera, ascribing them to an English Jesuit.
The Archbishop of Milan referred the matter to the General of the
Jesuits, and Father Tyrrell, when challenged, admitted the authorship.
He was then formally dismissed from the Society, and suspended from the
administration of the Sacraments, that is, not excommunicated, but not
allowed to say Mass, even in private. This is, of course, a mere summary
of the affair. The full account can be read in Miss Petre's Life,
where the letters and documents are fully set out. The deprivation of
his Celebret was extremely painful to Tyrrell, almost strangely so, since
his old faith was now in ruins. But, as he said in a letter to a friend,
" You and I are incurable Mystics, with Voltairean minds." Miss
Petre, his most loyal and faithful friend and adherent, says of him at this
time :

" It is not surprising if he was, for these reasons, exposed to new
influences from the side of a party more aggressive than that with which
he had hitherto been associated, and inclined to a line of action more
directly militant than that which he had hitherto followed. In his
nature was a curious blend of pugnacity and peacefulness, of reasonable-
ness and perversity. His quickness and power of resource made him
a good fighter ; his sensitiveness and disposition to anger made him
a bad one." 2

Tyrrell all his life, too, had bad health, and in these last years suffered
from torturing headaches. His English Jesuit colleagues had been,
and continued to be, kind to him, and even the General of the Society,
a German at Rome, had been rather remarkably forbearing so long as
he could. His best friends thought in 1906 that he would have done
wisely to retire, for the time at least, from the fray, and lead a quiet life,
but it was not in him to do this. Renan and Loisy, when they found
that their opinions made it impossible for them to continue work in and
for the Church, became laymen quietly enough, and proceeded on their
lines of study, treating the Church with calm denial, and formal, if
ironic, politesse. But they were Catholics born and bred ; a convert
is apt to be either " more royalist than the king," or, if he suffers a dis-
illusion, to be more bitter than the king's natural enemies.

The Baron was not, I think, in full touch, notwithstanding their
continuous correspondence and many meetings, with TyrrelFs mind
and its rapid developments. Of all men he least adapted himself to the

1 In letter of November 20, 1904, to Mr. W. J. Williams, quoted by Miss Petre
in her Life of Tyrrell, vol. ii. p. 219. This letter should be read as a whole.
1 Life of George Tyrrell, vol. ii. p. 282.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HUGEL 25

varying characters of his friends. He was always one with his true self,
and exact statement of the subject on which he wrote was the one motive
that guided his pen. But Tyrrell, like so many of us, was a good deal
influenced by the character and opinions of his correspondent for the
time being. He wrote and, no doubt, said things to others which he
would not have written or said to the Baron. Often, in his letters to
the Baron, he spoke of the ecclesiastical government as bad, stupid,
mad, certain to guide the ship, if they would not take Modernist advice,
within a few years to utter shipwreck, but he would not to the Baron,
as he did to others, have used certain expressions of extreme violence. 1

M. Albert Houtin, in his Histoire du Modemisme catholique
(p. 55), quotes a letter to himself from Tyrrell, in which he says that
" to scourge the imposture of ecclesiastical celibacy is to give the Pope
and the Devil a trump card against oneself." 2 This, says M. Houtin,
recalls what Bossuet said of Luther : " He has always in his mouth the
Pope and the Devil, as enemies whom he could beat down."

Another French critic, Pere Maurice de la Taille, S.J., said of
Tyrrell : " II y a du Luther dans cet homme, la remarque est d'un
Protestant." But Tyrrell had not the massive and coarse solidity,
physical and mental, of the mighty Saxon revolutionist, who drew
whole kingdoms in his wake. The lighter Irish temperament is a flame
that blazes rapidly and is gone. He felt like Luther, however, and often
applies to himself in his letters the famous " Ich kann nicht anders." 3

Could a man who had arrived at TyrrelPs point of view honestly
remain an officer of the Church, since the Church could not possibly
change its whole foundation to meet his views ? Tyrrell hardly thought
so himself. The question is especially difficult for a priest. There
was indeed the resort of " symbolism " that is, of continuing to accept
in appearance, and vocal use, the old creeds and doctrinal statements,
while attaching to them a meaning never dreamt of by the authors or
by any Christian till quite recent times. Tyrrell asked himself and

1 See, for instance, in Miss Petre's Life, vol. ii. pp. 265, 355, 407, and G. T.'s
Letters, p. 105. The Baron, in a letter of 1909, says that he " cannot but wish " that
Fr. Tyrrell had not " left his friends to form, sometimes, simply false notions of where
he stood with others."

2 "Flageller 1'imposture du celibat ecclesiastique, c'est donner au Pape et au
diable un atout contre soi."

3 M. Loisy, in an article in the Revue critique d'histoire, etc., July 15, 1911, said
of TyrrelTs book, Christianity at the Cross-Roads : " Entre son modernisme et celui
de If.'vangik et l'glise il y a la distance qui sfepare un mysticisme trfes ardent du
simple examen d'une croyance, d'une institution, d'une situation donnees. De
r<uangile et Ffiglise on a pu dire que c'etait un livre assez catholique mais peu
chr6tien (au sens protestant du mot). Le livre de Tyrrell est tres chretien, mais, en
verite', il est peu catholique. L'un ne contenait qu'un programme tres discret de
r6formes peut-Stre ndcessaires ; 1'autre est une proph6tie de revolution. Tous les deux
peuvent dormir ensemble au cimetiere des heresies."

26 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

others whether this symbolism was honest ? Was not John Morley,
he asked a correspondent friend, more right with his famous "No
Compromise " ? Tyrrell no more, now, accepted the decrees of Nicea
and Chalcedon as in any sense true or final statements than he did those
of Trent or the Vatican. Virtually he had reached, on the negative
road, the same point as Alfred Loisy or Marcel Hebert. But his
tragedy was that, more by far than these Frenchmen, he clung with his
affections to the Sacraments of the Church, while his intellect condemned
the foundation upon which they rested, the doctrinal authority, from
the beginning till now, proceeding through the utterances of popes and
general councils. And yet his heart clung also, until the end, to the
idea of the Catholic Church. He thought that, in some vague way,
it might continue without its old traditional doctrinal foundation, and
unbound from its connection with the See of Rome.

Professor Sauer, the Rector of Freiburg University, wrote to the
Baron in December 1908, after reading TyrrelPs Mediaevalism, that
he was struck, not less than by the " cutting and deadly sharpness of
his polemics," by " the convinced, warm-hearted religiosity of his
thought. Through this, that which Tyrrell writes distinguishes itself
essentially, however annihilating it may be for opponents, from that

which people like F and H write. For theirs is only the spirit

which denies continually, which has nothing more which it can build up
on the ruin which itself has made. These are not only sceptics, but the
religious thought is extinct in them."

During the two and a half years between his leaving the Jesuits and
his death, Tyrrell was occupied in book and article writing, correspond-
ence, and visits to the Continent, where he met some of his allies. He
rapidly became the leading figure in the whole militant Modernist
movement, the centre of active resistance to Rome. He had schemes
of a war of tracts, after the model of the Oxford Movement, and of
establishing a fund to support priests deprived of their living on account
of their ideas. When the Encyclical Pascendi was published, in
September 1907, Tyrrell took his decisive step. On September 26, in
the Giornale d Italia, he published a violent attack upon it, and followed
this up by two signed letters to The Times in the same strain, and, a few
days later, by an article in the Grande Revue, thus declaring war in three
countries.

The Roman Government of the Church regards bishops and priests
as its officers, who, whatever they may think privately, are bound not
publicly to attack its declared policy. It is exactly the same view as
that held in England with regard to officers in the civil and military
services. If an official in the Foreign Office assailed in The Times the
actions of the Foreign Secretary, he would find himself in trouble. It is
true that Tyrrell, suspended from his functions, might in 1907 have been

THE MEMOIR OF VON HOGEL 27

regarded as withdrawn from the active service ; still he was not only
a spiritual subject, but a priest. He well knew, when he wrote his
letters, that he would incur the penalty of excommunication that is ;
of being debarred from receiving as well as from administering sacra-
ments. He was informed of the excommunication, ordered from Rome,
by Dr. Amigo, Bishop of Southwark, on October 22, 1907.

Tyrrell now half desired to re-enter, and as a priest, the Church of
England, in which he had been born and bred. No doubt he would
have been gladly received into that service, as another Catholic Modernist,
the Rev. Alfred Fawkes, once an Oratorian, had already been. But
Tyrrell felt that, although his position would have been easier in that
less disciplined organisation, he would not have been at home there
either. The Baron was much opposed to the idea of this transmigration. '
Tyrrell wrote to him, of course with humorous exaggeration : " I believe
you would sooner see me an Atheist than an Anglican." The Baron
had always a most friendly feeling for Anglicans, and was even inclined
to dissuade any of them from entering the Catholic and Roman Church,
so afraid he was of subsequent disillusion, and of a last state worse than
the first, but he felt bitterly the lapse of any Catholic, even into a
communion so respect-worthy as the Anglican.

Father TyrrelPs tragic life ended at Storrington on July 15, 1909.
Friedrich von Hugel, faithful till death to his dearest friend, came down
on the gth and spent the last week there. Father TyrrelPs old and
intimate friend, the Abbe Bremond, also arrived in time to give some or
the last religious ministrations, and the Prior of Storrington gave extreme
unction. That which happened as to the funeral can be read in
Miss Petre's Memoir, with the fine address of the Abbe to the little
band of mourners. The Baron was among them, with his daughter,
Countess Salimei, the Baroness Gertrud of the early correspondence.

The death of George Tyrrell closed a period in the life of Friedrich
von Hugel. A movement in the Catholic Church, just because it is
a Church of many nations, holds together with difficulty, and the
Modernist movement, as such, now broke up. It had never touched
the mind or heart of the great mass of Catholics. Pius X, in 1910,
imposed the anti-Modernist declaration upon all Catholic teachers and
clergy, a step certainly repugnant to modern English ideas (since at any
rate the repeal in 1829 of our Test Acts) of what is right and wise.
Signature was required to a statement condemning the Modernist views
therein condensed and summed up. The statement was worded with
complete mastery of the subject and perfect lucidity, and, after this,
there could be no doubt as to the frontier line fixed between the position
held by the Church Authority and that of those who disowned the
Authority. The oath did not condemn pure historical and scientific
research, so long as the researchers did not draw inferences hostile to the

28 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

faith. Pius X, in fact, the " peasant-born Pope," called the clergy to
order, enforced discipline, and stated once again the fundamental
principles by which the Catholic Church stands or falls. In forming
an opinion as to this action, we should not forget or ignore that Rome was
in face of a long-continued, bitter, and widespread attack upon not
only the Catholic and Roman, but upon even the most purely and barely
deistic positions. In France, above all, from the beginning of the Third
Republic the war against the Christian religion, as expressed in the
Catholic Church, had been ever increasingly supported in word and deed
by the Government and Legislature, the bureaucracy, and those who
have anything to gain from these, the teaching profession, and the most
influential part of the Press. There are a thousand documentary proofs
of this, and M. Viviani, then Minister of Education, only voiced the
dominant will more frankly than, not all, but many, when he said in the
Legislative Chamber, on November 8, 1906 :

" By our fathers, our elder brothers, ourselves, we have attached
ourselves in the past to a work of anti-clericalism, to a work of irreligion.
We have torn away human consciences from the belief (la croyance).
When a poor wretch, fatigued with the weight of the day, bent his knee,
we raised him up. We told him that behind the clouds there was
nothing but chimeras. Together, and with a magnificent gesture, we
have extinguished the lights in heaven, lights which none will ever be
able to rekindle."

This peroration was hailed by " vifs applaudissements a gauche,"
and the Chamber decreed, by 240 votes against 128, that the speech
should be affichl in the 36,000 communes of France. 1 And Italy, then,
was in somewhat similar hands, and so were some other countries. It
was a specially critical time.

Pius X, in 1906-10, resembled an Imperator restoring discipline
among the officers of his army in face of an arduous external war. The
Catholic and Roman Authority does not, moreover, conceive itself,
primarily or as such, as a learned society for promoting research, but,
above all, as a Government charged with the tradition of doctrine and
moral order, with maintenance of the rule of peace, and with the care
and protection of souls, curbing the strong lest they should injure the
weak. Order, peace, and unity are not to be had without cost. And,
as J. de Maistre says truly, if rightly understood, " Les plus ignorants
des hommes sont ceux qui prennent pour un mal 1'inconvenient du
Bien." Almost the whole of the Catholic clergy, it is said, except in

1 An expensive proceeding, since to afficher a speech then cost about 30,000 francs.
Five months before the Great War the same M. Viviani, again Minister, spoke to
substantially the same effect before the Senate, though less picturesquely, and was
again affichl. An admirably well documented account of this long war against the
Church and the Religion has been given by M. Eugene Tavernier in his recent book,
Cinquante cms de Politique, which ought to be read in England.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HUGEL 29

Germany, though the exact facts are not known, accepted the anti-
Modernist oath, with whatever mental reservations in the minds of these
or those. Some abandoned the attempt to reconcile their views with
the fundamental doctrine of the Church and seceded. The Italian
leader, Antonio Fogazzaro, who died in 1911, wrote in the preceding
year that " Alfred Loisy is to-day neither Catholic nor Christian.
I shall never be wanting in respect to a man who thinks that he is in the
truth, but, Christian and Catholic as I am, such as I profess and have
always professed to be, I can absolutely no longer meet him on a common
ground of discussion."

That is typical of the cleavage and separation of paths which were \
now taking place between imparient^ revolutionists and patient reformers. \
Friedrich von Hugel believed in patience and charity, and knew that :
the sifting of the real from the unreal, the essential from the secondary,
the transient from the eternal, as in the parable of the wheat and weeds,
could not, and should not, be effected by sudden and violent action.
Of all men in the world he most firmly believed that Truth, or Reality,
in religion is an actual but infinitely complex thing, costly even in the
most gradual apprehension by our limited faculties. Like Fogazzaro,
he was now essentially consciously divided in thought, though not in
regretful affection, from his old friend and still frequent correspondent,
Alfred Loisy. Letters written in 1910 show how wide the dividing
gulf had become. The final ideas of M. Loisy are lucidly stated in
his book, La Religion, published in 1917. There may, conceivably,
according to him, be some Power of or in the universe, source of beauty
and moral order, but, if so, it is absolutely beyond our reach and touch.
The real object of religion turns out to be I'Humanite, the till now
Unknown God, whom men, according to M. Loisy, have always and
everywhere ignorantly worshipped under many personifications or self-
projections, as Jehovah, Zeus, Christ, and so forth, adapted to their stage
of social and intellectual evolution. Morality is duty towards this
idealised Humanity. Faith is faith in it. It is in the future, for
M. Loisy believes in worship, to be worshipped, as under some disguises
it is already, with patriotic, or superpatriotic, forms and ceremonies
on festival days such as for France, he suggests (disapproving of July 14),
should be the relief of Orleans by Joan of Arc, or the defeat of the
Germans on the Marne. England and Germany could have like
religious celebrations Trafalgar Day, say, and the anniversary of
Leipzig and so, perhaps, in the future would the League of Nations.
M. Loisy strongly holds, and with much force urges, that, to save
mankind, there must be religion and co-related morality, and that both
must ultimately be based, not upon the philosophic reasoning, which
influences so few, but upon innate instinct, social tradition, and a certain
mystic or not-rational sentiment. But his religion of the future seems

30 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

to be a new and rather tribal polytheism, with France, England, etc.,
as practical deities to adore, and a fainter worship for the supreme deity,
Humanity, still dim in the background.

If this is a religion at all, it is one very different from that of those
who, with Friedrich von Hugel and the Catholic Church in all ages,
believe in the Reality of God, as actual Being, other than, yet somehow
like to, ourselves, not merely our conception, and other than, though
in some sense creating, upholding and inbreathing the whole universe
of things, more or less dimly apprehended never comprehended by
men in all ages, and worshipped and adored under more or less imperfect
representations. Catholics should, von Hugel thought, adhere to the
Catholic and Roman Church, regarded as a whole in time and space,
as a guide in faith and morals, and not abandon what he called the nucleus
of factual and historical happenings, but, at the same time, should claim
and obtain full freedom in all regions of history and science, and
fearlessly face and adopt the fully demonstrated results of such research.
To him religion seemed a rope interwoven of three main strands the
institutional-historical, the mystical-intuitive, and the intellectual-rational
of which none is more or less essential to the whole than another. Each
of these, pursued without regard, or with too little regard, to the others,
leads by itself to great dangers. The Catholic Church has, on the whole,
always maintained the equilibrium, and this is its great merit, but from
time to time, or indeed perhaps always, there has been some disturbance
of the equilibrium at present, he thought, in the institutional direction
which has to be so far passively, at least, resisted that, with patience,
the equilibrium may be restored. The forward advance of the religion
should be made on the whole front, and not upon any one section.

This is a more difficult position to hold than that of the Absolutists
in right and wrong, just as, in the political sphere, the position of Edmund
Burke required more genius and thought for its holding and maintaining
than that of the English sympathisers with the French Revolution.
Father Tyrrell once wrote to the Baron that he suspected him of loving
complexity for its own sake, and asked whether all the great advances in
religion had not been in the nature of great simplifications ? Friedrich
von Hugel did not love complexity for its own sake, but he saw it as
a reality, and he believed that great simplifications meant great losses of
spiritual values.

Thus the roads of Loisy and von Hugel, and their respective followers,
ran parallel so long as it was a question of asserting freedom in scientific
and historical research, and then diverged. Their attraits had been
different from the beginning. 1

1 M. Loisy now really follows Auguste Comte, who wished to borrow as much
as possible from the Catholic form and cult, merely substituting Humanity for God.
" La Foi [Comte wrote] qui, substituant les lois aux causes et les devoirs aux droits,

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 31

IV

The Baron, in these troublous times, often feared that he himself
would, like Tyrrell, be deprived of the sacraments, and as late as 1913,
when some non-Catholic friends were arranging for an invitation to
M. Loisy to visit Oxford, asked, although he did not disapprove, that his
name should be kept out of the matter, lest he should suffer this loss,
since, as he wrote, the cup of official grievance against him was already
filled almost to overflowing. Probably there was not much danger of
this, although he was certainly regarded at Rome with suspicion and
treated with coldness down to the end of his life. His books were not
condemned. Dom Butler, O.S.B., formerly Abbot of Downside, said,
in a record in the Tablet after the Baron's death : " The Authorities
no doubt knew the religious influence he was wielding in circles outside
the Catholic Church, and did not think it advisable that that influence
should be weakened, or that work impeded, especially as the writings
were of a kind little likely to be read by many beyond those for whom
they were intended ; and also the Authorities well knew the man
himself."

What were these " circles " ? Father Butler well defines them :
" Trained intellectual men, high-minded, often either outside the pale
of Christianity or on its borderland, with felt religious needs, yet not
seeing how to accept the basic position of Theism." " With these," he
adds, " von Hugel was a quite extraordinary religious influence, bringing
home persuasively to minds enmeshed in the theories of Pantheism,
Monism, Idealism, Materialism, all the various philosophical misbeliefs
that hold captive such great tracts of the modern thinking mind, the
great theistic truth of the transcendent, spiritual, personal God, and
man's relation to Him. The range of his influence over religious
philosophical thought in Great Britain, in America, and also in Germany,
may be gauged by the sale of his books, phenomenal in the case of such
very tough reading, calling for equally tough thinking."

remplace Dieu par I'Humaniui " (Appel aux Conservateurs). The French Catechisms
positiviste teaches children that " en un mot, 1'Humanite se substitue definitivement
a Dieu, sans oublier jamais ses services provisoires " the provisional services of an
assumedly non-existent Being 1 Virtually this is the kind of teaching that French
governments have adopted for all grades of schools, the trouble being that Dieu
appears so incessantly in older books taught as literary classics. M. Loisy's later
writing is quite in this line. The chief difference between him and Comte is that
Comte posed as the originator and founder of a new universal religion, whereas Loisy,
more wise and modest, represents the religion of Humanity as being evolved by the
usual nature processes as the latest, and therefore best, form taken by the eternal
instinct or spirit of religion. Pius X said in 1907, with Lfivangile et fSglise chiefly
m mind, that the Modernists were not trying to lop branches, but were " laying the
axe to the root of the Tree " true of some comprehended under that wide designation,
certainly.

32 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Friedrich von Hvigel, in 1908, at the age of fifty-six, completed
and, about Easter, published his first and largest book, The Mystical
Element of Religion, to the composition of which he had devoted
immense labour for years. In the autobiographically interesting preface
he says that the work " embodies well-nigh all that the writer has been
able to learn and to test, in the matter of religion, during now some
thirty years of adult life." It was a book not made of set design, but
gradually growing, like an outbranching tree in every direction, out of
a study of St. Catherine of Genoa on which he had embarked in 1898.
I do not attempt in this memoir to make observations upon the Baron's
books except where they specially illustrate his life they are there for
those who are wise enough to study them, and also are able to give the
time to writings that cannot be read cursorily. But, at this point,
I must give an extract from the preface to the Mystical Element, precisely
because it is autobiographical.

" Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have never left
me ; a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost from the first, of
the massively virile personalities, the spacious, trustful times of the
early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissance there, from Dante on to the
Florentine Platonists. And when, on growing up, I acquired strong
and definite religious convictions, it was that ampler pre-Protestant, as
yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive and
Catholic, world, with its already characteristically modern outlook and
its hopeful and spontaneous application of religion to the pressing problems
of life and thought, which helped to strengthen and sustain me, when
depressed and hemmed in by the types of devotion prevalent since then
in Western Christendom. For those early modern times presented
me with men of the same general instincts and outlook as my own, but
environed by the priceless boon and starting-point of a still undivided
Western Christendom ; Protestantism, as such, continued to be felt
as ever more or less unjust and sectarian ; and the specifically post-
Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental Seminarism, its
predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousness and timidity, per-
sisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its failure to win my
love. Hence I had to continue the seeking and the finding elsewhere, yet
ever well within the great Roman Church, things more intrinsically
lovable. The wish some day to portray one of those large-souled
pre-Protestant, post-Mediaeval Catholics was thus early and has long
been at work within me."

Then, he says, came Newman's influence, with the Dream of
Gerontius, a deep attraction to St. Catherine's doctrine of the soul's
self-chosen, intrinsic purification ; " much lingering about the scenes
of Caterinetta's life and labours, during more than twenty stays in her
terraced city that looks away so proudly to the sea." But then, when

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 33

he had entered deeply into the religion and soul of Catherine, he wanted,
he says, " to try and get down to the driving forces of this kind of
religion, and to discover in what way such a keen sense of, and absorption
in, the Infinite can still find room for the Historical and Institutional
elements of Religion, and, at the same time, for that noble concentration
upon not directly religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon
laws of causation or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper
of mind and its specific, irreplaceable duties and virtues. Thus, having
begun to write a biography of St. Catherine, with some philosophical
elucidations, I have finished by writing an essay on the philosophy of
Mysticism, illustrated by the life of Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna and her
friends."

Thus, by natural growth, a book which was originally intended to
be a short study (in 1 898 to consist of 1 20 pages) ended by becoming one
of nearly nine hundred pages, and only limited to that by excessively close
packing of the thought. If any man ever suffered from embarras de
richesse it was Friedrich von Hiigel. At the beginning of their friend-
ship the Baron told Father Tyrrell that he had not, till then, been able
to find in England, as he had found abroad, any Catholic with whom
he could intimately share his thoughts ; and after Tyrrell's death this
was also, it would seem, the case. Perhaps Abbot Butler, of Downside,
and Professor Edmund Gardner came nearest to this. It was a want,
because between a Roman Catholic and others there must inevitably
be certain reserves and sometimes misunderstandings which preclude,
not, indeed, the most friendly intercourse, but the most intimate
intellectual communion. But, after the publication of the Mystical
Element, the Baron became better known to outside circles in the
English-speaking countries. His large correspondence was not now
so much with Modernist friends in France and Italy, some of whom had
taken roads which disappointed him, as with Anglicans and Non-
conformists of various shades, and with learned German Lutheran
Protestant-born men, as Professor Rudolf Eucken of Jena, and Ernst
Troeltsch of Heidelberg old friends of his, " whose care for religion
never flags," he wrote Professor Heiler of Munich, now of Marburg,
Heinrich Holtzmann, the New Testament critic, and others. His
German-Scottish mind was far more in real touch with these than with
Frenchmen and Italians, or even Englishmen.

In England the Baron was amicably, and a little complacently,
regarded as a " broad-minded Roman Catholic," who could understand
and sympathise with those " of other denominations," and that he had
been in some trouble with Rome was not thought other than a kind of
recommendation. He now frequently received invitations to con-
tribute to reviews on religious matters, and to give addresses to societies,
with which he complied as far as he could. He was an early member

D

34 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

of the Synthetic Society, started in 1896 (much owing to the exertions
of its secretary, Mr. Wilfrid Ward) as a kind of successor to the old
Metaphysical Society, but with a more special view to possible religious
approximations. Here he met distinguished men, as Mr. Arthur
Balfour, now Earl of Balfour, and his brother Gerald, most lucid of
thinkers, Bishop Talbot, afterwards of Winchester, always a warm friend
of the Baron, and Canon Gore, later Bishop of Oxford, Mr. Haldane,
afterwards Lord Chancellor, Mr. James Bryce, Lord Rayleigh, Dr.
Martineau, Sir Alfred Lyall, Edward Dicey, Richard Jebb, R. H.
Hutton, an old friend, editor of the Spectator, Dr. James Ward of
Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick, also of Cambridge, so like a Greek sage,
Frederick Myers, Dr. T. B. Strong, Dr. Rashdall, the Anglican
Modernist, Dr. Bigg, Dr. Henry Scott Holland, philosophers like
Professors Seth and McTaggart, admirable amateurs like George
Wyndham, Alfred Lyttelton and Hugh Cecil, and others. Father
Tyrrell was also a member, and I myself also had that honour. This
Society lasted until 1908, and then, without, I think, any formal
dissolution, came to an end.

The Baron also belonged to the end of his life to another Society,
still flourishing, in which, I think, he felt more really at home, the
London Society for the Study of Religion, founded in 1903. The
L.S.S.R., as it is usually called, is composed, in certain proportions, of
men belonging to definite religious bodies, and taking serious and
special interest in religious and moral questions. To this Society also
I myself belonged, and I can vouch for its great value as a stimulant to
thought, and as creating and maintaining the most friendly relations.
The practice is that some one should read a paper, and that then those
present should in turn make their observations upon it. The Baron's
deafness prevented him from hearing either the paper or the discussion
following there could be no greater trial than this to a man who loved
so much to exchange thoughts so the custom was that the writer of
the paper should send it beforehand to him to study. He then spoke
first and said what he thought. In thus speaking, as also in those letters
to authors in which he criticised their books, he invariably began by
praising as warmly as he could all with which he agreed, and then stating
any points on which he was not in agreement. He held, he once told
me, that this was the right method in all criticism, and that, if praise and
assent came first, the recipient was more ready to accept subsequent
disagreement, whereas, if adverse criticism preceded, subsequent praise
only seemed like an attempt to soothe wounded feelings.

In these discussions the Baron, as we invariably called him, " the
Baron," par excellence, was seen at his finest and noblest. He spoke
with a singular fire and sincerity which made one feel oneself, at least
made me feel myself, relatively cold, empty and insincere. Mr. Edwyn

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 35

Beyan described vividly and most truly the Baron at these meetings, in
an article, after his death, in The Times.

" Those who heard the Baron speak at one of these meetings will
never forget it the grey hair standing up from his forehead, the large
dark eyes in a face as of fine ivory, the divine fire which seemed to fill
him, the passionate sense of the reality of God, which broke forth in
volcanic utterance, strange bits of slang and colloquialisms mingling
with magnificent phrases, and left him, when he ended, exhausted and
trembling."

The Baron used many exclamations when he spoke. When he
repeated with approval something said by the writer of the paper, he
would say, in his deep and broad accent, " That's fine !" or " How good
and true that was ! " or " I was so pleased to hear him say," etc. Or,
when he pursued to its conclusion some train of reasoning to which he
was adverse, he would end with "No, no; that won't work"; or
" it- will not do." In private conversation the Baron excelled in
narrating a. course of events, and in describing characters. To win his
praise it was all-essential that he should believe a man's life to be
" clean," a favourite word with him, and his conduct to be in all respects
" straight." It was a real pain to him that anyone whom he knew should
fall away from higher ideals once held.

Another member of the same Society, Claude Montefiore, wrote of
the Baron after his death (in the Jewish Guardian] :

" The feeling deepened with each conversation one had with Baron
von Hugel that one was in the presence of a very big man, and a man,
moreover, who was a peculiar, beautiful and rare combination of scholar
and saint. He was immensely learned in philosophy and theology,
and all he knew he had assimilated. But that was the least of it. He
was much more than learned. The Times Memoir speaks of the
religious fervour which was so harmoniously united ' with the
philosopher.' And it was so pure and purified a fervour. This man,
one felt, had a noble character as well as fervour, a grand soul as well
as a grand mind. He knew a lot about religion and God from endless
books and much thinking, but he also knew a lot about them from
experience and from life. When he talked about God, one felt, some-
how, that he had a triple right to do so, because he had studied and
thought so much, because he had felt and experienced so much, and,
above all, because he was good and pure and devout. I do not think
he would have given this impression if he had not been also perfectly
simple, very open-minded and very humble. Saintliness and conceit
do not, I fancy, ever go together, and the Baron was amazingly modest.
He was so charming to lesser men and ordinary people ; so appreciative,
so ready to learn from anybody. His friendship made one proud, but
it also humbled. One talked to him as an equal, and yet all the time one

36 VON Ht) GEL'S LETTERS

felt one was talking to somebody so big, so far beyond one in learning
and in nearness to, and knowledge of, God."

After referring to the Baron's writings, Mr. Montefiore adds :

" But the books, great as they may be, are but a fraction of the man.
The great scholar-saint was much more than any book, and a much
greater evidence than any written words of the God in Whom he so
passionately believed. In spite of all the appalling perplexities of evil,
I find it harder still to think of von Hugel as a toss up. Somehow for
such souls as his, one seems to need God to account for them."

Friedrich von HiigePs second book, Eternal Life, was published
in 1912, in his sixtieth year. This book, like his first, rose rather out
of accident than of set purpose. He says in the preface : " The Rev.
Dr. James Hastings invited me to contribute to his Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics ; and his instructions concerning ' Eternal Life,'
the first of the articles thus undertaken by me, were to make the paper
as long as the subject-matter might seem to deserve or require. He
was, in this, doubtless thinking primarily of his Encyclopaedia as
a whole ; whereas I myself became so engrossed in my subject that
I allowed my composition to grow as long as its great subject-matter
pressed it to become. The result, anyhow, was that the article, when
sent in, was found to be far too long for the scope of the Encyclopaedia j
and Dr. Hastings kindly arranged with Messrs. T. and T. Clark, the
publishers of the Encyclopaedia, to issue my article as a separate book
the present volume."

" This little private history," the Baron adds, " is recounted here
in order to explain how any writer possessed of even average modesty
could venture on so bewilderingly vast a subject. I sincerely doubt
whether I would ever have dared directly to undertake a volume upon
this subject-matter. Yet this task, thus originally undertaken as but
one of several articles, did not, somehow, appear as preposterously
ambitious j the work, once it was started, seemed to grow under my
hands ; and nothing as yet attempted by me has flowed so readily from
my pen. The subject had doubtless been occupying my mind and life
for many a year j and thus there is some reason to hope that these pages
may, in their turn, live for a while, and that they may, here and there,
help some religious students and stragglers."

This fine book, of nearly 400 pages, more symmetrical, and more
lucidly written than the Mystical Element, is, mainly, a condensed
review of great thinkers on the subject the Hebrew prophets, St. John
and St. Paul, Plotinus and Dionysius, Augustine and Aquinas, Eckhart
and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, and then Schleiermacher, Troeltsch,
and other modern philosophers. The concluding chapter, entitled
" Institutional Religion," is not, perhaps, very intimately connected
with the main theme, but is of great interest. Probably the Baron

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 37

wished to take this opportunity to state fully the thoughts which had
so long occupied him as to the character and position, the virtues and
defects, of the Catholic and Roman Church, to which he so faithfully
belonged. Readers will forgive me if I try to restate his position.
But, first, I wish to quote a passage from the preface to Eternal Life,
biographically important because it marks the line of division between him
and some of his old Modernist allies who had fallen into pure subjectivism,
or, as it might more clearly be called, the theory of self-projectivism.
He here says, after speaking of " the central position occupied, in the
fullest experiences and articulations of Religion, by the Reality, the
Difference, and yet the Likeness of God " :

" A critical Realism, a Realism not of Categories or Ideas, but of
Organisms and Spirits, of the Spirit, a purified but firm Anthropo-
morphism, are here maintained throughout as essential to the full
vigour and clear articulation of Religion. It is plain that this difficult
subject is indeed inexhaustible, and that much discussion and discrimina-
tion will be required in this matter from ourselves and from our successors;
yet it is, surely, quite as plain that Subjectivism has had its day for a good
long while to come. Certainly, nothing can well be more arid, more
drearily reiterative and useless, in face of the entrancing richness and the
tragic reality of life, than is most of the still copious literature, not seldom
proceeding from thinkers of distinction and technical competence, which
attempts to find or to make a world worthy of man's deepest, ever costly
and difficult, requirements and ideals, within avowedly mere projections
of himself. We have thus everywhere man's wants and man's illusions
illusions which, at their best, are of a tribal or even racial range and
utility, but which, one and all, convey no trustworthy intimation of any
trans-subj ective, more than merely human validity and reality whatsoever."

Friedrich von Hugel's first book, the Mystical Element, was written
during the storm and stress of the Modernist controversy. In the
preface he speaks of himself as " one who would be a proudly devoted
and grateful son of the Roman Church," and he adds that " only if there
are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant
wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church even
conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be the
culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet, to be such, they must
find something thus to crown and measure ; various degrees of, or
preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and
exist still, far and wide, now that they have come." In the same
preface he says of Cardinal Newman : " It was he who first taught me
to glory in my appurtenance to the Catholic and Roman Church, and
to conceive this my inheritance in a large and historical manner, as a slow
growth across the centuries, with an innate affinity to, and eventual
incorporation of, all the good and true to be found mixed up with error,

38 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

and with evil in this chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which
this living organism moves and expands." Thus what Friedrich von
Hugel stood for, all his life, was Catholicism, Roman Catholicism, as the
best and highest development of the Christian religion in history, but
wider and more free in its range than now, tolerant in seeing good in
all that is sincerely religious outside itself, both in the past and in the
present, not afraid of scientific ascertainment of facts in any direction.
He thought that the task of science was gradually, not violently, to
purify religion from unessential accretions gathered through its long
course, and so to lighten it for higher and wider flights in the sublime
regions of its true element. Science should be to religion and the
Church like the waters of the sea in Keats' sonnet,

"... at their priestlike "task
Of pure ablution round Earth's human shores."

In the last chapter of Eternal Life (pp. 336368), Friedrich von
Hugel begins by saying that he has " long and profoundly benefited
by Institutional Religion, and he watches wistfully its present-day
operation and men's alienation from it ; he does so from within the
most ancient, the most powerful, and the richest of such Institutions,
the Roman Catholic Church ; and he is fully certain that what he may
accurately diagnose here applies, mutatis mutandis, to all Institutional
Religions throughout the world." Then, following his favourite method,
he takes five heads, two primarily intellectual, and three moral-political,
in which the " essential strength and attraction, and the actual weakness
and repulsion," of the Roman Catholic Church are closely intertwined
in " nearly related power and defect." Thus he gives the qualities and
defects of those qualities, or the bright side and shadow side, the obverse
and reverse. He does not in the least tone down what he deems the
present defects, but in each case he gives reasons for thinking them
a passing phase, and for patience. These divisions are finely and
delicately, and most frankly, drawn, and those who wish to see the
author's exact position should refresh their memories by studying this
whole section of Eternal Life, which cannot be condensed here without
injury to the meaning. In the preface to this book he said :

" If man's spirit is awakened by contact with the things of sense,
and if his consciousness of the Eternal and the Omnipresent is aroused
and (in the long run) sustained only by the aid of Happenings in Time
and Space, then the Historical, Institutional, Sacramental must be
allowed a necessary position and function in the full religious life. No
cutting of knots however difficult, no revolt against, no evasion of abuses
however irritating or benumbing, are adequate solutions. Only the
proper location, the heroic use, the wise integration of the Institutional
within the full spiritual life are really sufficient. The writer is no

THE MEMOIR OF VON HUGEL 39

Quaker, but a convinced Roman Catholic ; and hence, do what he will,
he cannot even minimise these for himself utterly intrinsic questions."

At the close of this preface he submits his conclusions, " which
cannot fail to be at least imperfect in many ways and degrees," "to the
test and judgment of my fellow Christians and of the Catholic Church."

In his address on " Progress in Religion," delivered in 1916 to the
summer school meeting at Birmingham, the Baron said :

"This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily
a need for men who will teach and exemplify, not simply Natural,
This- World Morality, but a Supernatural, Other- World Ethic ; and not
simply that abstraction, Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis,
but that rich concretion, this or that Historical Religion. In proportion
as such an Historical Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless
contain affinities with all that is wholesome and real within the other
extant historical religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual
through their own special developments, where these developments
remain true at all. As well deprive a flower of its ' mere details ' of
pistil, stamen, pollen, or an insect of its ' superfluous ' antennae, as
simplify any Historical Religion down to the sorry stump labelled ' the
religion of every honest man.' We shall escape all bigotry, without
lapsing into such most unjust indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and
unceasingly apply the doctrine of such a Church theologian as Juan
de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660), Spaniard, post-Reformation
Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological Professor, and a Cardinal writing
in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban VIII, teaches that the members
of the various Christian sects, of the Jewish and Mohammedan com-
munions, and of the heathen religions and philosophical schools, who
achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily, simply through the aid afforded
by God's grace to their good faith in its instinctive concentration upon,
and in its practice of, those elements in their respective community'
worship and teaching, which are true and good and originally revealed
by God. Thus we escape all undue individualism and all unjus'i
equalisation of the (very variously valuable) religious and philosophical
bodies j and yet we clearly hold the profound importance, next to God's
sanctifying grace, of the single soul's good faith and religious instinct,
and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and imperfect,
which environ such a soul." 1

Friedrich von Hiigel certainly did not, as was said of Lacordaire,
make I'apologetique au grand orchestre, or as Bossuet, to whom he
preferred Fenelon, did so grandly and sonorously in his day. No, his
method was that of facing severally each doubt and difficulty, stating
what could be said for and against it, with minute care and consideration

1 This address is printed in the volume of Essays and Addresses, p. 92. The
reference to de Lugo is given there.

40 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

of facts, and reconciling as far as possible, in this dim world, the pros
and cons, and arriving at the mean conclusion which is, in effect,
/ though more dynamically used by von Hiigel, the method of St. Thomas
Aquinas, adapted to our very different modern conditions. He did not
actively desire to make converts from Church to Church, or to disturb
those whom he found peacefully and contentedly grazing in their native
pastures, and finding there all that they need, though he believed that
the Catholic and Roman Church was richest in spiritual possessions
and potentialities, the most complete and the most abiding. But he did
wish ardently to make others believe, really believe, in the Reality, the
objective Reality of God, and his influence lay in the fact that a man
of his wide learning, mental power, piety and soul-quality, did so himself
believe. If, by his own faith and personality, he brought to this real
belief some who felt doubt as to this and everything else, and if, then,
such persons found that the world-wide, all-uniting, and historically
continuous society of Christians, centred visibly at Rome, gave them,
as it did to himself, the form, more than any other, for themselves at
least, adequately aiding the worship and adoration of the God whom
they had found this, I think, would have been the only kind of conversion
to the Catholic Church, through his assisting influence, that would have
given him complete satisfaction. He had great pity on those whom
Byron calls " the Orphans of the Heart " :

" Oh Rome, my country, City of the soul,
The Orphans of the Heart must turn to thee."

It would, then, be entirely wrong to think that the Baron, fair as
he was to those outside, and unwilling to disturb them, was in any sense
i a lukewarm Roman Catholic. In his Address of May 20, 1920,
delivered to Junior members of the University of Oxford, he expressed
his " very deliberate, now long tested, conviction that, be the sins of
commission or of omission chargeable against the Roman Catholic
authorities or people what they may, in that faith and practice is to be
found a massiveness of the Supernatural, a sense of the World Invisible,
of God as the soul's true home, such as exists elsewhere more in fragments
' and approximations and more intermittently." And, two years earlier,
in October 1918, in his address in London to the Executive Committee
of the British branches of the Christian Student Movement, on
" Institutional Christianity," every word of which is of the greatest
interest and importance^ he said :

" It is well that von Gierke, F. W.Maitland,A. L. Smith, J. N. Figgis,
and P. T. Forsyth Lutheran, Agnostics, Anglican, Congregationalist
should, during these last three decades, have been busy (more fruitfully
than with sheer abuse, or even than with discreet silence) with the
immense, unique services of Rome, precisely also in this matter of Unity.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 41

For myself I do not doubt that the day may the day will come when
Rome (what is true in the Protestant instincts even more than in the
Protestant objections having been fully satisfied) will again unite and
head Christians generally, and this in a temper and with applications
more elastic than those of the later Middle Ages and especially than those
of post-Reformation times. The Visibility of the Unity is doubtless
here the central difficulty ; yet nothing which falls deliberately short of
Visible Unity can or should be the goal. . . . For a Catholic, the full
end and the deepest centre of the Church can never be simply the
Church, still less the simply human social virtues taken as such, virtues
which, by abstraction from much else, we can more or less segregate from
out of the Church's total fruits. For the Catholic, the Church essentially
possesses, seeks, finds, and leads to God, Who alone can and does
constitute the fully adequate home of the supernaturally awakened soul.
The Church is doubtless, historically speaking, rather the substitute
for, than the expansion of, the Kingdom of God. But whether this
Kingdom of God, for which the Church waits and for which she
prepares, is to come suddenly or slowly, in this world or in the next, or
a little here and fully hereafter, in any and every case the Kingdom of
Heaven will, for the human soul, doubtless include the society of this
soul's fellow-creatures, each contributing to the joy of all the others.
Nevertheless, the root, the centre and the crown of all this social joy
will be God God apprehended as more and other than all men, than
all possible finite beings put together indeed as more and other than
are His life and love in and for all His creatures. The Church, the
Catholic Church in its fullness, the Roman Catholic Church, here again
has fathomed the needs and implications of religion : the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, even the seemingly Pantheistic insistence upon Substance
in the Trinity and upon Things in the Sacraments are, at their best,
grand preservatives against all sentimental humanism against every-
thing that would make God into but a mirror, or into a mere purveyor,
of men's wants. Man's deepest want is, in reality, for a God infinitely
more than such a mere assuager of even all man's wants. Especially
also is He more than the awakener of all, even of our noblest, national
aspirations. And thus again we persistently require One great
international, supernational Church which, by its very form, will
continuously warn us of the essentially more than national character of
all fully awake Christianity.

" A sense and spirit religion and a single world-wide Church : God
thus becomes, not only the sole possible originator, preserver and
renovator of such a Church, but also the central end and attainment
of such a Church. We shall thus in the One Church, through the One
Christ, reach, most fully and firmly, the infinitely rich One God."

42 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

V

After the publication in 1912 of Eternal Life, the Baron began
a book intended to be a study of the character and writings of his friend
Sir Alfred Lyall, who died in 1911. He was much interested in Lyall,
who seemed to him a God-hungry soul, trying, perhaps, to emerge from
the sceptical philosophy of Hume and others which had fascinated his
youth, and from the effects on his mind of the Eastern Paganism and
metaphysics so closely studied during his Indian career. They had met
first in the Synthetic Society. The Baron once said to me, " I think that
Sir Alfred Lyall likes to come sometimes to talk to me, because it interests
him to find a man who does believe in God." Mary Sibylla Holland,
a sister of Alfred Lyall, became a Catholic in 1889, and the Baron was
much interested also in her published letters, and often gave copies of
this book to his friends. 1 He wrote part of this study of character, with
long critical excursions into the sceptical philosophy and into Lyall's
views as to the natural process of deification in Hinduism, but then
abandoned or adjourned the attempt, so that the book was never
completed. It might have grown into a considerable work, as did the
study of St. Catherine of Genoa He intended to call it "Agnosticism
and Faith, as exemplified in the religious opinions and writings of
Sir Alfred Lyall."

The next book written by the Baron was The German Soul, pub-
lished in 1916. The outbreak of the Great War hit Friedrich von
Hugel very hard. He was heart and soul with the cause of the Allies,
as a matter of right and justice, but could not bear to hear the wild
generalisations as to the character of the whole German people, then so
rashly broadcast, and his German descent and his many warm friendships
in Germany made the thing heart-breaking, especially since some of
the men whom he most admired and respected signed the manifesto in
which German thought-leaders at the beginning of the war stated their
belief in the justice of the cause of their Fatherland. The Baron had
never gone through the process of naturalisation as an Englishman, and,
when the war came, he was registered as an " enemy alien," and not
allowed to leave his house for a night without a police permit ; but this
was soon put right by a formal naturalisation. In the latter part of the
book, The German Soul, there is a piece of autobiography which must
be given here. The Baron says :

" Many a pure Englishman has lived much more in Germany,
especially amongst Prussians proper, than has been the case with myself.

1 Letters of Mary Sibylla Holland (3rd edition ; Arnold, 1907). Another book of
somewhat the same kind, which in the last year or two of his life the Baron gave to
friends, was Journal et Pensees de chaquejour of Elisabeth Leseur.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 43

Of my sixty-three years of life, well over forty have been spent in
England ; and only twice has a full year been lived unbrokenly amongst
a Teutonic people in Vienna and in the Austrian Tyrol. Moreover,
though my father was of pure German blood, he was entirely West
German ; his father was from Coblenz, his mother from Mainz, and
this whilst those territories had still some twenty years to run as Catholic
Prince-Bishoprics strongly opposed to Protestant Prussia. My father
was born at Ratisbon (Bavaria) in 1795. My grandfather had moved,
from the chancellorship to the last Prince-Bishop of Treves, into the
diplomatic service of Austria at first under the last two Holy Roman
Emperors, Leopold II and Francis I. And my father himself continued
this general and genial, quite un-Prussian, German spirit, as an Austrian
military officer and diplomat, and as an oriental traveller and botanist,
up to his death in 1870. The racial, national attraction which,
increasingly since his Indian travels in 1833, rivalled that of German
Austria was, assuredly, never Prussia, but always England.

" In my own case it was inevitable that England, almost from the
first, equalled, and then, fairly early, out-balanced, in social and political
matters, the attrait of Austria, even though I have never received
anything but kindness from that country, and though I felt keenly
having to decide against her in her present unhappy involvement
against England. Born in Florence, when my. father was already
fifty-seven, of a young English, or rather Scotch, mother ; seeing
Austria for the first time, from seven to eight, and then, practically for
the last time, at eighteen ; never at school or university there or indeed
elsewhere, but coming away from Vienna in 1871, an invalid for many
years, and exempted, as such, from military service ; Italy, then Belgium,
with my seven years' residence at my father's Embassy in each, could
not fail to be more real to me than Austria. And since those early
years it has been England that has been my home, except for nine winters
spent in Rome, a summer in Westphalia, and two short visits to Jena,
Heidelberg, and Wurzburg, and one (further) visit to the Tyrol. And
an English wife and British-born daughters of course strengthened these
British ties.

" Nevertheless, I am continuously conscious, by the mental methods
and habits natural to me, in matters of history, philosophy, theology, of
a certain subtle difference in temper and instinct, throughout a con-
siderable range of my nature, from even the dearest of my many dear
English friends, and indeed, in a lesser degree, from the non-German
blood and range within myself. This consciousness of difference and
of isolation, with its sadness, all but wholly and promptly disappears in
the society of Scotchmen, so that it probably springs as much from my
Scottish blood as from my German. In any case the general German
affinity I am tracing here brings me, I find, no nearer to the Prussian

44 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

mentality than the pure Englishman is brought, by his affinity, to the
Prussian state of soul ; nor does this affinity prevent my social and
political outlook and sympathies from being thoroughly, consciously,
gratefully English. Even in 1858 I remember feeling strongly, in
Florence, with the Italian movement for an Italian Italy ; and I have
never lost this feeling, even though I early came to realise how pure
was the administration, and how light the taxation, by Austria, of
Tuscany, Lombardy and Venice ; and ever since eighteen, Edmund
Burke (in all but his latest, shrill utterances) and, hardly less early,
Samuel Johnson have been amongst my chief inspirers in such large social
and political matters.

" Yet my much loved tutor, from eight to fifteen, was a Rhenish
Prussian Lutheran, and my education was, for those years, supervised
by the well-known Catholic historian, the Rhenish Prussian diplomat,
Alfred von Reumont. And my late initiation into Hebrew I owe to
the Hessian convert, the strongly anti-Prussian Catholic Priest-Professor,
Dr. Gustav Bickell. Most of the recent books that have influenced me
much the great works of Rohde, Oldenberg, Gunkel, Bernard Duhm,
Heinrich Holtzmann, Otto von Gierke, Ernst Troeltsch are all
German. And then there have been the friendships, with roots too
deep, I trust, for even this terrible war and its poignant differences to
destroy, with such Catholic laymen as Martin Spahn and such Catholic
clerics as Albert Ehrhard and Joseph Prenner ; and with Protestant
University Professors, such as Rudolf Eucken and Ernst Troeltsch.
Heinrich Holtzmann, that utterly guileless soul and ceaselessly generous
friend, has already gone to where wars are no more."

The sorrows of this time were increased by a private grief. The
Baron had not been in Italy since December 1907, when he attended
the marriage of his daughter Gertrud to Count Francesco Salimei at
Genoa. In that year, 1907, so especially trying through the position
of ecclesiastical affairs, and the misfortunes of some of his friends,
Friedrich von Hugel had lost from his home two daughters, one to
religion and one to marriage j for his youngest daughter, Thekla, had
in the spring, at the age of twenty-one, entered the Carmelite Convent
at Netting Hill, and at the end of the year his eldest, Gertrud, married
and went to live in distant Rome. Sad losses, whatever the natural or
supernatural consolations, for a father whose affections are tender, and
whose life lies entirely in his own house. And now the death of
Gertrud deprived him of his .dearest correspondent. Always of con-
sumptive tendency, she became very ill in the spring of 1915, and her
father, who had not seen her for three years, went out to Rome with
his daughter Hildegard to be with her, and remained there until her
death in August. After this last sad visit he saw Rome no more.

In 1917 the Baron was asked to be member of a committee convened

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 45

by Bishop Talbot, of Winchester, which was to inquire into religion in
the Army. There is a shorthand report of some of the remarks, pro-
testing against too great simplification of religion to meet the under-
standings of the least educated, which he made at a sitting of this
Committee, and they are so characteristic of his way of speaking, at the
L.S.S.R., for instance, and also so autobiographical, that I have given
them as an Appendix to this Memoir.

The remainder of Friedrich von Hugel's life can be summed up
shortly for the purpose of this, as has been said, mere outline. His
way of living had always been very different from that of the " Average
Englishman." He never, I suppose, took part in any game or sport,
unless it were croquet, though he required to spend a good deal of time
in the open air. His only exercise was walking or, at one time, bicycling.
In his earlier days he could do this over the heights of Hampstead in the
summer, and abroad in winter. In later years his diversion mostly took
the form of strolls along the glades of Kensington Gardens, where an
advantage to age or weakness one can always find a chair or bench at
short intervals. Here he could often be seen, a singular contrast to the
thought-free faces of nursemaids and children round him, with his soft
wide-brimmed black hat and cape-cloak, and with his little intelligent
pekinese dog, Puck, for a companion. He said that he had learned
much from Puck, and in one of his Essays he points out how incompre-
hensible is man to dog, and yet how indispensable, and how the dog
sometimes needs to relax the strain on his mind by resorting to the
company of other dogs, and yet, unsatisfied, always must return to his
master ; and he indicates an analogy in the relations between God and
man. The Baron was a frequent victim to the insatiable desire of the
children in Kensington Gardens to know the exact time of day, because
they were instinctively attracted to him and knew that he loved them.
In July or August the family usually left London for a few weeks for
a change to the Malvern Hills, or to Thursley, or the healthy slopes of
Hindhead, or to some house lent to them near London, such as Lady
de Vesci's at Englefield Green, where he could walk and muse in
Windsor Forest or by the banks of the Thames. He was always fond
of observing flowers and trees and creatures in country solitude. He
went sometimes for a few days to Cambridge to see his mother till she
died there in 1913, and his brother Anatole, or to Oxford, where he
had numerous friends. Sometimes also he visited Downside Abbey in
Somerset, where his friend Dom Butler was abbot, and afterwards
Dom Ramsay. He rarely made country-house visits ; now and then
to Wilton, near Salisbury, the home of his wife's family. He went also
to Farnham Castle to visit his friend, Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Winchester.
He belonged to no Club, not even to the Athenaeum, notwithstanding
its library, and very rarely " dined out." His deafness precluded him

46 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

from theatre and concert-room, also from hearing lectures or speeches.
He did, however, in his later days much enjoy kinema shows, where
deafness is no obstacle. He needed, he knew, some change from the
great subjects which absorbed his thought, and rather systematically, and
more on principle than from desire, sometimes took a bout of light
literature. But even this was, for him, hardly a relaxation. If he
were reading a novel of Trollope, he could not help doing so with minute
and critical attention, recording on the page-margins notes and cross-
references, as if it had been a work by Troeltsch or Eucken. After
dinner in the evening he usually relaxed his mind, or rather gave a change
to it, for this was also with him strenuous occupation, by piecing together
jigsaw picture puzzles. He did not, I think, take that kind of pleasure in
poetry or other forms of belles lettres which, in another sphere, one obtains
from the fine flavour of various wines or the scent of divers flowers, the
pleasures of fine taste. He rarely quotes from the poets. Those whom
he read most were those who give most food for thought Dante, Words-
worth, Robert Browning. Perhaps Browning was his favourite English
poet, as a stater of moral and religious enigmas, and hunter after solutions,
and with something in his work nobly akin to the jigsaw picture puzzle.
One has to fit many queer-cut pieces together before one can see the
picture as a whole, and even then not very clearly. He liked some
novels, especially Meredith and Trollope, and used in earlier days to
read aloud Scott and Dickens and Thackeray to his family. He found
much amusement in the pictures and text of Punch, and in the words and
music of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Academic honours came to the Baron in his last years. He was
made an honorary LL.D. of St. Andrews University in Scotland, to
which University he bequeathed his library by his will. In 1920 he
received the degree of D.D. from the University of Oxford. He was
offered in 1922, and accepted, the GifFord Lectureship in Edinburgh
for 192426, but was compelled by the ever- worsening state of his
health to withdraw before any lectures were ready for delivery. But
in these last years he worked on a book which contained the substance
of these abandoned lectures, with the title of The Reality of God. On
this he laboured to the very end of his life, so far as his failing physical
powers and interruptions would allow. The book was left not quite
completed. Some of these interruptions were numerous letters from
all quarters which he was too generous not to answer with his usual
care and thought. Others were lectures and addresses which he would
not refuse to give. Some of these were published in 1921, in the
volume entitled Essays and Addresses, and others in the second series,
published in 1926, containing some of his latest thought and most
interesting and lucid writing. One of these addresses, delivered to
young men at Oxford in May 1920, was afterwards printed in the

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 47

American Constructive Quarterly, and some prefatory words of the Baron
are so characteristic that they may fitly be given here.

" I have still vividly before me the sea of eager youthful countenances
upturned in welcome to the substance of this paper, when I was privileged
to speak it to them at Oxford in May last. It then struck me once more
with a wistful delight that in very deed Christianity flourishes through its
Saints, and that the surest way to rob it of its congenital attraction is to
shrink from its heroic heights. And further it struck me afresh that
this great fact, and the apprehension and presentation of religion with
this great fact maintained, as its very life-blood throughout it : that these
are visions and utterances which youth must not be expected of itself
to see and to proclaim steadily and whole. It is for the trained and
experienced seniors to hand on this steadily flaming torch of life and
love to the as yet fitful juniors. If Lucretius was right to see the
successive generations of mankind transmitting, each to the next, the
light and warmth of civilisation, in a sort of gigantic torch race : still
more applicable is this noble simile to the history of heroism and
holiness.

" Now let us observe that not only young individuals but also young
nations, and with them more or less every at all pure democracy, are
not likely of themselves to perceive the full costliness of the deepest
life and richest wisdom. The arduousness, the rarity, the straightened
circumstances in and for this our earthly life, of all things greatly
beautiful : this can hardly be felt very widely by young countries, still
less by materially prosperous democracies. Amidst such conditions
the equality of external opportunities (even this and even here rather an
ideal than a sheer fact) is readily taken, by the average citizen, a man
nowhere much of a thinker, as somehow effecting, or as even identical
with, an actual equality of insight, of character, of heroism. We had
better leave out holiness from the list, since holiness is apprehended too
little to be taken as distributed at all. Yet all these greatest gifts of
God and of mankind as fructified by Him, remain, after all the glib
talk on both sides of the Atlantic, ever costly and uncommon, although
this, not as curios or eccentricities, but as genuine glimpses of the ideal,
the final measure of man an ideal and a measure ineradicably inherent
to our poor minor insights, characters and duty-doings.

" May the deliberately homely form of the following pages bring
clearly before us what is the sole sufficient yeast to our heavy Philistinisms,
the sole sufficient antiseptic to our deeply ingrained unwholesomenesses :
the expansive pang, the majestic peace within conflict, the freedom and
the wide-spreading fruitfulness of the heroic act, the heroic life the life
in and for God and Christ."

A beautiful feature in Friedrich von Hugel was his love of, and
faith in, youth, and his ardent desire to encourage in it all higher moral

48 VON HtGEL'S LETTERS

and intellectual life. This will be seen in some letters in the present
collection addressed to quite young girls and boys.

The Baron's work on The Reality of God was seriously inter-
rupted in 1923 by the correspondence involved in arrangements, which
he was promoting, for a visit of Ernst Troeltsch to England, in order
to give some lectures at Oxford, Cambridge, and to the London Society
for the Study of Religion. The Cambridge authorities simply refused,
even five years after the war, sanction to lectures there by a German
professor ; those of Oxford only gave assent upon being assured that
Dr. Troeltsch had, on account of certain insufficiently " patriotic "
utterances, been denounced by a more militant German professor as
a traitor to his own country. Then, after all this trouble and letter-
writing by the Baron, who also had to supervise translations of the
proposed lectures, Ernst Troeltsch unexpectedly died a short time before
the date fixed for his visit, a cause of great sorrow to the Baron, who
valued so highly his friendship and contribution to religious thought.
Had it not been for this affair, it seems possible that he would have been
able to complete his last book, in the race against Time and Death,
but it was like his generous heart not to fear sacrificing his own dearest
ends in the cause and interest of a friend. His health at this time did
not allow him to do more than an hour or two of real work in the day,
and he was more and more tormented and exhausted by the sleepless
nights which had always been among his trials.

Friedrich von Hiigel's inborn devout spirit led him to the fullest
practice of his religion, and in this he was strengthened by a sense of
duty, because, he thought and said, the wider the claim he made for
freedom of expression in philosophical, critical, and historical matters,
the more exact in life and practice he was bound in honour to be. He
often, indeed, spoke with impatience of what he called the " frills " of
religion, too numerous and soul-dissipating minor devotions, but no one
took part more sincerely and regularly in the central and sacramental
rites, or was more constant in private prayer, meditation, and spiritual
reading. He set aside a fixed time every day in which he read either the
" Imitation," or St. Augustine's " Confessions," or the Bible. He made
regular use of the Rosary. The Church which he most constantly
attended was that of the Carmelites, near his house on Campden Hill ;
sometimes also, for evening Benediction, or for a visit to the Blessed
Sacrament, the Chapel of the Nuns of the Assumption in Kensington
Square. The intensity of his devotion struck those who saw him
before the Altars. Dr. Sauer, Rector of Freiburg University, said to
Madame von Schubert, a lifelong friend of the Baron, after his death :

" He was one of the most remarkable of men, and, in consequence,
not to be understood by such as knew him not intimately. I have seen
him, after the sharpest critical argument, or after slashing away at some

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 49

abuse or faultiness in clerical or Church questions, go into the nearest
Church and pray, rapt and absorbed like a saint or a child."

Abbot Butler, in his article in the Tablet after the Baron's death,
after ably stating von Hiigel's position in, and influence upon, the
world of modern thought " the powerful intellect, the acute, massive,
highly trained metaphysical mind, compelling attention by the manifest
value of the message delivered " adds :

" But beyond all compare greater than the intellectual appeal was
the moral appeal of von Hiigel's personal religion. The warm flow of
deep unaffected piety pulsates through every page of his greater writings
as their very life-blood. Everyone who reads them, and still more
everyone who came into close personal contact with himself, could not
but feel that religion was the great all-absorbing interest of his life, the
one thing he supremely cared about. And not merely religion, but
Catholic Religion : in how many places of his writings does he proclaim
Catholicism to be of all religions the highest, fullest, richest, most helpful,
most powerful, true ; and again and again he says he could not think
of himself as anything else than a Catholic. Nor was his any sort of
esoteric philosophic Catholicism : he practised the recognised popular
devotions of workaday Catholicism.

" For some twelve years, from 1894 to about 1906, while he lived
at Hampstead, I used frequently to stay with him for three or four days.
In the afternoon we every day went for a walk over the Heath ; it was
while ' Saint Catherine ' was in the making, and he used to discourse
of how the work was shaping itself in his mind, and develop the proposed
treatment of the various parts, following up any train of thought that
emerged Fenelon, Bossuet, Pere Grou, St. Teresa, or other favourites.
Such talks were as walks over the mountains in the fresh keen breeze,
in the light and warmth of the sun, in view of a panorama of wild scenery
or spreading landscape exhilarating, bracing, deepening, broadening,
uplifting : I have .never experienced quite the same with any other man.
And we always returned home by the little Catholic Church in Holly
Place it was his daily practice and went in for a long visit to the
Blessed Sacrament ; and there I would watch him sitting, the great
deep eyes fixed on the Tabernacle, the whole being wrapt in an absorption
of prayer, devotion, contemplation Those who have not seen him so
know only half the man.

" It was this combination the knowledge that this powerful, keen,
sympathetic intellect was in union with a vital warmth of deep over-
mastering religiousness that made Friedrich von Hugel to be, if not an
' apologist,' certainly himself an arresting ' apology ' for those religious
truths, for that Catholicism, that were the very life of his life." 1

Most Englishmen shyly avoid in conversation the deeper subjects,
1 The Tablet, February 14, 1925.

E

50 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

and so perhaps we almost lose the power of thinking about them. Not
so Friedrich von Hugel. His religion was so intimately one with him
that he could speak about it in the most natural way in the world. He
had not had that Public School education which, if it fits English boys
to succeed in the world, and is right enough in its own way, yet does
only too effectually repress development through free expression of the
deeper side of human nature. If an Englishman does in public speak of
these deeper things, he is usually not one with his subject and therefore
self-conscious, as a man always is when he acts a part not really his
own. The Baron notices this characteristic in his book, The German
Soul. He himself could talk with equal ease and absence of self-
consciousness of high things and low ones, not really low to him, because
in all things, however apparently small and insignificant, he saw the
greater signified and expressed, the universal relation. It is this which
made one feel him so extraordinarily and richly human, this and his
great humility, which preserved him from the slightest trace of the
nouveau riche in learning. He suffered some great afflictions his
deafness, his frequent ill-health, his loss of a most beloved daughter,
misapprehensions by many who should have understood him better ;
but he had also that blessed life which, as St. Augustine says, is nothing
else than Joy derived from Truth (" beata vita quae non est nisi gaudium
de veritate"), and this one could see and feel illuminating his whole
personality. And then there was in him the affection, the expressed
affection shining in the eyes and toning the voice, the unique affection
fed by keen and disinterested love of souls. A lady writes of him :
' He had the innocence of a child, and was always in the presence of
God. I shall never forget when in the Tyrol he talked to me of God,
his whole soul absorbed in God." Of how many men whom one has
met could one say that ? And, above all, of how many men of vast
learning ? One imagines St. Thomas Aquinas like that, and Sir
Thomas More.

He believed not only in the " prayer of union," but in the utility and
duty of prayer for others. A lady, a very old friend of his, writes :
" The very last time I saw him, in October 1924, he was full of the old
eager interest in all my dear and much-tried children and their families,
and reminded me that for over forty years he had prayed three times
a day for each and all of them with their little ones. I saw then that
in his expression which convinced me that I should never speak to him
again."

The essence of actual religion lay for Friedrich von Hugel in heroic
Virtue and in Adoration. I remember his saying, " A religion is not
worth much unless it produces heroic acts." What he meant by heroic
or supernatural virtue appears very clearly in the fine address given to
young men at Oxford in May 1920, on " Christianity and the Super-

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 51

natural." 1 Here he groups his examples under " seven heads, seven
great virtues, here at their supernatural level, which together, like
the seven prismatic colours, form a rainbow of thrilling, ceaselessly re-
juvenating, reconciling beauty, truth, and goodness, thrown in splendour
over the swampy tracts and murky atmosphere of poor, average and less
than average human ugliness, insincerity and mediocrity of all kinds
and degrees." Courage, purity, compassion, humility, truthfulness,
self-abandonment in the hands of God, spiritual joy these are his
seven great heroic virtues, and each of them he illustrates by striking
examples.

And of adoration he said : " The sense of the Objective, Full Reality
of God, and the need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion." a
For him, not benevolent philanthropy, on the one side, nor intellectual
dogmatic statement, on the other but Adoration, was the last word
and final end of religion. Mrs. Cecil Chapman, a lifelong friend,
writes that " it was in the early spring of 1924 that I had my last visit
from the Baron. We were living in London, and he came to tea with
me. I thought him looking very ill, and it was j ust before his breakdown .
He had been working hard for a year over the Troeltsch affair, and had
had no proper holiday. We talked much of a book which had greatly
impressed him ' Journal et Pensees,' by Elisabeth Leseur. He
spoke of the effort it sometimes cost him to get his mind to work on his
great book it was painful to realise what it cost him and he got on
to the subject of Parkman's long writing on Canadian history. He
described how Parkman never spared himself, and, in spite of bad health,
worked on and on until he got his book completed the great earnestness
of purpose which he had displayed.

" ' And yet,' said the Baron, ' it wasn't Religion. There was no
Religion in the hard work and sacrifice.'

" ' What is Religion, then ? ' I asked.

" ' Religion is Adoration,' answered the Baron.

" I have thought of it ever since."

To this same friend he said, about four weeks before his death, with
intense earnestness, " It is very awful to think of the unbelieving soul "
the soul void of God-consciousness and Adoration.

The Baron's health, never good, had been badly shaken in the last
few years. In the autumn of 1 9 1 8 he had to undergo a grave operation.
After this he was better for a time, but in the spring of 1924 he had a
very serious illness. On March 18 his doctor thought that he could
only live for a few hours, and he received Extreme Unction. After
this he rallied a little, though he looked as frail as possible, and could
work for a short time each day at his book, dictating to his secretary,
Miss Adrienne Tuck. He did so, until the day before his death.
1 Essays and Addresses, p. 284. a Idem, p. 90.

52 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

The end came on January 27, 1925. He had a nurse in the house
to take care of him, one of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary,
and every morning, after seeing to him, she went out for half an hour,
as he desired, to the 8 A.M. Mass at the church close by on Campden
Hill, On that morning he said to her, as she went out, " Pray for me."
When she returned, she found him lying on his bed, just drawing his
last breath. It must have been a quick and gentle death. He was in
the seventy-fourth year of his life.

The burial was at Stratton-on-the-Fosse, in Somerset, in the ground
of the Catholic Church there, close to Downside Abbey, next to the
graves of his mother and of his sister Pauline.

The inscription is from Psalm Ixxxiii : ". . . For what have I
in heaven but Thee ; and beside Thee what do I desire on earth ? "

VI

The notices in journals and reviews appearing after his death testify
to the remarkable position held by Friedrich von Hugel in the universal
thought-world. Still more intimate witness to the effect of his character
and teaching upon the souls of individuals is to be found in letters received
by Lady Mary von Hugel at this time.

" Tous ceux qui Font connu," wrote M. Loisy from Paris,
" garderont le souvenir de sa bonte, de sa loyaute, de sa saintete."

Claude Montefiore wrote of "the dear and great Baron," and said,
" I think you would have been pleased to see at the last meeting of the
L.S.S.R. how people spoke, and still more, how deeply they obviously
felt, about the beloved and distinguished and noble member who had
left us."

The Abbot of Farnborough wrote :

". . . Vous n'ignorez pas combien j'admirais la grande intelligence
de votre cher Mari, et je le venerais pour la profondite et la sincerite
de ses sentiments religieux. J'etais fier de compter parmi ses amis.
J'ai done quelque droit d'associer mon deuil au votre et a celui de vos
filles. Je vais celebrer la sainte Messe pour le repos de sa chere ame ;
mais je n'ai pas moins confiance qu'elle est maintenant dans la lumiere
vers laquelle elle s'est toujours orientee."

Dr. Josef Prenner, of Vienna University, wrote :

". . . Ich werde den grossen, edlen, frommen Denker, dessen
ungemein tiefes, reiches, fruchtbares inneres Leben um die grossen
Grundideen, Gott und ewiges Leben, sich bewegte, nie vergessen ;
meine personliche Verpflichtung gegenuber seiner Gedankenwelt ist so
gross, dass meine Dankbarkeit gar nicht erloschen kann."

Some letters show the feeling of members of the Protestan Lutheran
Church. Dr. Soderblom, Lutheran Archbishop of Upsala, wrote :

THE MEMOIR OF VON HUGEL 53

" No one can but heartily rejoice with the great and good man of
God, who has now been called to enter into the rest of the Lord, that
he has been allowed to rest from his works. And my first thought and
act, when I understood that the Baron Friedrich von Hugel had finished
his days on this earth, was to praise the Almighty on my knees, because
He has given to our age that lover of mankind, that penetrator into the
very mysteries of the human heart and religion, that universal teacher
and that blessed saint.

"If you allow me to tell from my far-off seat the impression and
conviction that I got already in 1908 and that has been strengthened
continually during the following years, that lay-Bishop in the Church
of God was not only the foremost religious and theological thinker and
writer of the Roman Church to-day, but no other man in our age has,
as far as I can see, become a teacher and an initiator to seeking and
believing souls in all the chief sections of the entire Church and
communion of Christ, as von Hugel.

" With an evermore accentuated and wholehearted solidarity with
his own Church of Rome, he combined a genial and generous appre-
ciation of Christian thought and devotion in other mansions of God's
great house, and that generosity got a wonderful expression in his essay
on the late Ernst Troeltsch.

" Thus the Baron von Hugel represented in a very rare sense the
Una Sancta Catholics, and he appears to me as a fulfilment, as it were,
in his person of the ancient Christian Prayer :

" ' Venij Sancte Spiritus,

Reple tuorum corda fidelium,

Et tui amoris in eis ignem accende,

Qui per diversitatem linguarum cunctarum,

Gentes in unitate fidei congregasti.'

". . This world has become poorer and emptier through his
departure. Such losses concentrate our longing faith still more upon
the eternal world of God.

" But his spirit, who is living in God, and who will be glorified in
Him as well as he has been sanctified in the truth, will continue its
blessed action in the Church on earth through the personal impression,
received from him, and through his writings. I wonder how far he
has been able to accomplish the manuscript of his great, eagerly expected
work on God ? . . .

" Here the words of the prophet find the full application. ' Qui
docti fuerint, fulgebunt quasi splendor firmamenti ; et qui ad justitiam
erudiunt multos, quasi stellae in perpetuas aeternitates.' "

Professor Friedrich Heiler, of Marburg, wrote :

"... Was sein Hinscheiden fur die Christliche Kirche und

54 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

Wissenschaft bedeutet, glaube ich ganz besonders fiihlen zu konnen.
Ich war nicht nur ein eifriger Leser und dankbarer Bewunderer seiner
Werke ; sein Schrifttum hat vielmehr den denkbar tiefsten Einfluss auf
mein ganzes Denken und Leben ausgeiibt. Meine Veroffentlichungen
zeigen auf Schritt und Tritt wieviel ich von seiner hochsinnigen
Frommigkeit und geistestiefen Forscher Arbeit gelernt habe. Ich
kenne ausser ihm nur einen Mann, der in ahnlicher Weise meine innere
Entwicklung bestimmt hat, und das war sein warmster Freund und
Bewunderer, Erzbischoff Soderblom. Friedrich von Hiigel war der
grosste romisch-catholische Laientheologe, ja, der grosste katholische
Denker der Gegenwart, so schrieb ich in einem Aufsatz, der vor acht
Tagen erschien, und ich wiederhole es heute in dem wehmiitigen
Gedanken, dass er nicht mehr unter uns weilt. Aber mag er auch
ausserlich von uns geschieden sein, das grandiose Lebenswerk, das er
geschaffen hat, bleibt bestehen. Das hohe Ideal der Katholizitat, das er
erfochten hat, ist unverganglich. Sein Name wird in Ehren genannt
werden, so lange Christen an die una sancta, catholica Ecclesia glauben."

Anglicans felt as warmly as Lutherans. One wrote :

" He held up a light for us all in the misty and confused world . . .
a light which still burns in his words, even if he himself is taken from
our sight. But I hope and believe that, nearer to the Divine Presence,
he will still help us with his prayers through what remains to each of
us of our way through the shadows and confusions, and that we may
be kept by divine grace from stumbling, and meet him again, please God,
without shame."

Another wrote :

" He will be mourned for and thought of in many countries and in
very different circles, for his influence was far-reaching, and his work
was rather for the morrow than the day. He was one of the chosen
few who laboured for peace, and now he has gone to receive the reward
of peacemakers. Anything from his pen commanded immediate
attention, and in dark and troublesome times he did very much to sustain
the faith of men in perplexity, and to warn them from desperate steps.
I have often been surprised, for instance, to find how English Non-
conformists were influenced by his writings."

Another, in Anglican Orders, speaks of the " profound reverence
and the affectionate gratitude which will always stir within me at the
bare mention of his name. Among thinkers and writers he was the
greatest religious influence of my life."

A Catholic Priest wrote :

"... I feel sure that it must be some consolation to keep with you
the memory of a great man, who used all his talents to help so many in
their intellectual difficulties, and to guide others along the dark paths to
the light of true faith. God rewarded him in this life with great faith

THE MEMOIR OF VON HUGEL 55

and a profound insight into mysteries to which he brought a pure life
and a singular piety. I cannot imagine him doing anything he con-
scientiously knew to be wrong, or even wasting an hour of his time."

" He brought wisdom [wrote an old lay friend], sympathy, and joy
to our hearts whenever he entered the house, and he never left it without
our longing that he might be spared."

A distinguished professor of Edinburgh University wrote :

" I have myself known the Baron only for some seven years, but in that
time he has, in his extraordinary kindness to me, come to mean so much
to me, and has exercised so profound an influence upon my whole
outlook on life, and, in his own personality, presented so much that I
had never before met in any man, and upon my philosophical studies,
that even I cannot easily reconcile myself to the thought that I shall
never again have the delight and instruction of his society and counsel."

Another non-Roman Catholic wrote :

" It was a great thing in my life to have had the privilege of knowing
him, and to have been among the many, many people who had their
sense of the visible and invisible sharpened and strengthened just by
seeing him."

M. Rene Guiran, Professor of Theology, of the Eglise Libre of
Canton Vaud, wrote to Professor Heiler to thank him for a fine article
in the Christliche Welt upon Friedrich von Hugel, and said :

" Tous ceux qui ont aime et porte en eux le respect de cette grande
personnalit6 chretienne vous seront reconnaissants d'avoir parle d'elle
avec tant de comprehension et de vraie sympathie, et d'avoir attire sur
elle 1'attention de notre public si indifferent en general aux valeurs
intimes et profondes que M. von Hugel a si magnifiquement et si
humblement incarnees."

One might add many more to these very genuine tributes of affection,
esteem, and gratitude, but it is more than time to close, with, however,
a few letters from women who loved the Baron as their teacher and
friend. One such wrote :

" It is impossible for me to exaggerate what I owe to your Husband.
He has taught me all that I know which seems worth knowing, and to
how many people it must appear the same. For he stood quite alone
in the world in his deep insight, sympathy and comprehension, coupled
with his profound piety and devotion. But I cannot use the term
' lost,' as having lost him, for his great personality remains alive and
present, and, please God, the inspiration of his influence may not leave

me."

Another wrote that the Baron's death seemed like the end of an
epoch in one's life, and said : " I owe him, literally, everything I value
most, and hundreds will be telling you the same, for no one could be
in any contact with him and remain unchanged."

56 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

Another, quite a stranger, said : " I want to tell you what reading
of the two books, the MysticaJ Element and Essays and Addresses, has
done for me. It has opened a new world ; it has cured my soul of
sickness ; and helped me where no priest helped me. Since I have
had those books I have had such veneration for him that, but for a feeling
that it would be a vulgar impertinence, I would have gone a pilgrimage
to him, and thanked him. And now he is dead I feel nearer to him,
and I pray to him."

And another :

"... dear, holy, kind friend that he was of half a life-time !
I can hardly realise it. What a loss to all who knew, loved and
appreciated him throughout the Catholic world ! And yet, with all
our sorrow, I can only feel a certain joy and elation to think that he is
now there with God, where his soul and mind and being had ever longed
to be, and, one may say with truth, always were, even in life. He
certainly lived ' in Christ.' "

In another letter the same kdy speaks of " his intense love of God
which was the motive force of all his life," and says :

" His great soul and wide sympathy will only be understood by one
who realises that it was a reflection of the eternal holiness which shone
through his words and actions, a wide and open heart for every struggling
soul in search of Eternal Truth. In difficulties and troubles none ever
came to him or wrote to him without finding help and encouragement,
often a stern reminder where one should seek and find one's own
mistakes, a clear, unhesitating judgment if, in one's youthful pre-
sumption and folly, one tried to shift some responsibility off one's own
shoulders, and yet the tender and warm understanding for one, often
crushed down by life's difficulties and life's pain."

And one who was very near and dear to him, and who was one of
the very last to see him, wrote :

"... I have lost the best friend I ever had, or could have had.
His care for little insignificant people, and the way he spent himself
for them ! I think it was more wonderful even than his great mind.
It comes to me, and people like me, most. He looked so frail and
transparent yesterday that I was not unprepared."

After his death the same lady saw him, and speaks of " that great
and infinitely beautiful presence," and adds :

" All hope seems hallowed in a strangely penetrating way. I cannot
try to say in words the gratitude and reverent love that is in my heart,
and all that his great goodness to me has been to my life, for it is far beyond
all telling, but it dwells enshrined in my heart. So many, many souls
will feel simply bereft."

r I close these testimonies by one, of much truth and beauty, written
to myself, by Bishop Edward Talbot, formerly of Winchester. He says :

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 57

" I always felt very unworthy of the extraordinary generosity and
humility with which he treated me he who was such a tower of strength
and treasure of learning, and master in character and saintliness. How
wonderful he was in his intellectual scrupulousness and accuracy, his
quick and warm sympathies, his splendid inclusiveness of outlook, his
love of small people and his humble ways.

" Why, one asks, are there not more such hero-saints, such loving
sages ?

" How deep, and how large, he made one feel Truth and Life to be !
How splendidly he fused loyalty and independence !

" It will be no easy task for you to portray him, with loyalty to
yourself and to your Authorities, and yet so as to explain how he drew us,
who were not of the same allegiance, to himself, and made us feel utterly
at home with him. May God bless you in a holy task of truth and
charity."

I do not know whether I have at all succeeded in the difficult task,
but the letters themselves will explain the drawing power.

APPENDIX I

The following notes were taken by Friedrich von Hiigel of the
sayings to him of the Abbe Huvelin, in Paris, during a week of May
1886, when he was thirty-four years old. The Baron from time to
time gave a copy to a friend ; the present copy has been given to me by
Dr. Sonnenschein. They show the impression of his character and
special spiritual needs made upon an observer of experience and genius.
It must be remembered that these are all special counsels addressed to
one person.

In sending the notes to Dr. Sonnenschein, the Baron wrote :

" I am keenly aware how much less living and probing these, to me,
winged words and fiery darts will come to anyone not in precisely the
sore need I was in at the time when all this, and much more, was said
to me, by one whose spiritual greatness and piercing vision were already
palpable facts for my experience. Still they may help you, if, as I expect,
you are continuing more and other than literary in your hunger and your
search."

Those who have read the Memoir of Charles, Vicomte de Foucauld,
will remember that remarkable conversion completed by a stroke of
spiritual genius, surely an inspiration, of the Abbe Huvelin.

58 VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS

SOME OF THE SAYINGS OF ABBE HUVELIN
ddvice given to F. v. H., Paris, May 26-31, 1886

I

Vous ne trouverez que tres rarement des ames qui vous comprennent ;
ce seront toujours des ames solitaires, fort individuelles, qui ont beaucoup
souffert.

II
La Priere sera, pour vous, plutot etat qu'acte precis et delibere.

Ill

La verite est, pour vous, un point lumineux qui se perd, peu a peu,
dans Pobscurite.

IV

II n'y a pas de regie de securite dans les travaux critiques : la priere,
eviter 1'obstination voila tout.

V

Ne lisez jamais les journaux religieux ; ils vous jeteraient en toutes
sortes de tentations, ils vous feraient un mal inoui. Jamais moi-mSme
je ne les lis. Lisez les Actes du Saint-Siege, mais separement.

VI

Quant aux Scolastiques, il parait qu'ils possedent une langue d'inities,
/ et que ceux qui n'ont point pass6 par ces etudes, n'ont point de droit de
parler. Moi, je n'y suis jamais passe. Aussi me fait on savoir que je
n'ai point le droit de parler. Mais moi, je tiens les realites ; eux, ils ont
les formules. Ils ne s'apersoivent point que la vie, toute vie, echappe
a Panalyse. C'est du cadavre mort, ce qu'ils dissequent. C'est fort
peu de chose. Passez-les avec un doux, un bien doux, sourire.

VII

Pour vous, vous prenez Papologetique telle qu'elle se trouve dans
la vie, telle qu'elle se prsente a Pesprit candide et seul en face de la
realite. L'apologetique ordinaire ne vaut rien ; elle est souvent in-
genieuse, mais toute fausse. Ce sont des figures geometriques : elles
ont une grande regularite, elles n'ont aucune realit6.

THE MEMOIR OF VON -HUGEL 59

VIII

Le detachement ne doit jamais etre pratique pour lui-meme ; je ne
me detache que pour m'attacher. Je lache le mauvais ou le moins bon,
pour saisir le meilleur ou le parfait. Jamais je ne lache, pour tomber
en un trou.

IX

Les theologiens se trompent parfois ? Je le crois bien ils se
trompent, et souvent. Les sciences, les experiences ont fait beaucoup
de chemin depuis que la theologie s'est arretee.

X

II vous faut une tres grande liberte d' esprit avec une tres grande
purete de cceur : vous pourriez etre tres orthodoxe aux yeux des homines,
et tres mauvais aux yeux de Dieu. Jamais 1'on ne parviendra a limiter,
a restreindre votre esprit : soyez tres conscientieux, 1'orthodoxie suivra
la conscience. Et pour vous je dis pour vous en particulier ne blessez
jamais la charite ; la charite et la foi, chez vous, c'est la meme chose
elles s'abaisseront et elles monteront ensemble.

XI

Laissez les autres vous faire souffrir ; ne faites jamais soufFrir les
autres.

XII

Vous comprenez fort bien les autres, vous etes dans 1'obscurite sur
vous meTne. Ce ne sera jamais ce que vous donnerez, ce sera toujours
ce que vous retiendrez qui vous fera souffrir. II vous faut la religion
tres belle, toute belle : c'est sa beaut6 qui toujours vous retiendra. Ce
n'est que 1' essence pur du Christianisme qui vous tient et vous retiendra
dans 1'Eglise : c'est tres bon signe.

XIII

La petitesse ne se saisit que par contraste avec le grand : vous ne
deviendrez vraiment humble qu'a force de travailler. Ne rabaissez
jamais votre ideal ; qu'il aille toujours croissant. Ne traitez point vos
etudes, leur ideal, comme bagatelle. Reconnaissez le contraste en ce
que vous voudriez faire et ce que vous faites.

XIV

Vous devez souvent 6tre tente d'expliquer tout par le physique.
Cela provient tout simplement de ce que vous etes malade. Un peu
comme chez les medecins : la maladie est ce qui se presente tout d'abord
et continuellement a vous tous les deux.

60 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

XV

Pour la contrition, il faut que vous ayez une haine de vous-meme,
mais calme, paisible, qui vous vienne a la priere, par contraste avec la
vue de Dieu, et qui ne soit point detaillee, mais generale.

XVI

C'est votre etat que de trouver plus de douleur a 1'eglise qu'ailleurs.
Pour moi, la semaine la plus douloureuse de toute Pannee, c'est la Semaine
Sainte, et de toute la journee, les moments de la consecration a la Com-
munion en ma Messe. II faut tout doucement s'humilier et se patienter.
La religion vous devient tres facilement trop detaillee et trop intense.
Le recueillement, les choses divines en general, vous echappent a mesure
que vous les cherchez ; elles vous viennent, quand vous ne les cherchez
pas. C'est de 1'eau qui s'enfuit toujours d'au dessous de vos pas.

XVII

Vous ferez toujours beaucoup de bien en vous ouvrant aux personnes
qui vous seront sympathiques. Vous leur prouverez qu' elles ne sont
point tout-a-fait seules dans le monde.

XVIII

Pas de reunions Catholiques, pas de confreries : si P edifice s'eleve
sans echaffauds, d'autant mieux.

XIX

Les Protestants seront, d'ordinaire, plus attrayants pour vous que
les Catholiques. Ces derniers portent souvent le soleil en leur poche.
Mais ne vivez pas de comparisons. Allez votre chemin ; laissez les
autres aller le leur. Ne pretendez point forcer les autres a voir de votre
maniere ; vous n'y parviendriez jamais. Dieu se sert de tout. Moi-
meme j'ai assiste a des sermons qui m'auraient fait beaucoup de mal,
dont j'ai cependant constate les tres bons effets sur un grand nombre des
auditeurs,

XX

Oui, il y a eu des Saints, des grands Saints de votre attrait. S. Francis
d'Assise (je ne dis pas les Franciscains) voil un saint tout de forme de
vie, mouvement, lumiere et chaleur.

XXI

Oui, il faut agir. Vous etes malade ; Pactivite aura done en sa
forme quelque chose de plus ou moins maladif chez vous. Mais n'ayez

THE MEMOIR OF VON HtTGEL 61

pas peur : agissez, aimez ; vous avez un besoin infini d' expansion, la
contrainte vous tue.

XXII

Oui, je comprends. Ce que les autres appelleraient des preuves,
n'est pour vous qu'indication, ebauche, echantillon. La scolastique,
prenez S. Thomas le plus grand des Scolastiques, n'explique pas tout ;
la verite vivante echappe aux definitions de tous cotes. Us croient
pouvoir rnettre la lune en une bouteille ; cela pourrait se faire, si elle
etait un fromage.

XXIII

Oui, vous avez horreur de " bonne philosophic," " bien-pensant,"
parceque vous cherchez la verite, point 1'orthodoxie ; il faut que
1'orthodoxie s'arrange avec la verite c'est son affaire a elle.

XXIV

II y a dans 1'figlise le sacerdoce ministeriel et le sacerdoce mediatorial.
Tous les deux viennent de Dieu. Leurs rapports exactes nous ne
pouvons point connaitre ici bas, mais nous savons bien que ces deux
sacerdoces ne sont point identiques.

XXV

II y a dans l'glise des ames d'une tres grande independance d' esprit,
qui ne peuvent, qui ne doivent, point se faire a aucun des precedes
ordinaires. Comme la recherche du bonheur prime tout en la Morale,
et que 1'on ne doit ni ne peut demander a personne ce qui 1'entraverait,
de meme 1'on ne peut et ne doit demander a personne qu'il se detorque
et se defigure Pindividualite que Dieu lui a donne. Mais ne 1'oubliez
jamais : la majorite, elle aussi, a ses droits : droit a votre silence, droit
k vos managements, droit a votre respect. Pourquoi tenter de changer
les autres, pourquoi tenter de les amener a vous comprendre ? Vous ne
parviendrez jamais ni a 1'un ni a 1'autre.

XXVI

II n'y a pas d'ennemi plus profond et plus dangereux du Christianisme
que tout ce qui le rapetisse et le rend etroit.

XXVII

Jamais vous ne perdrez, jamais vous affaiblirez votre foi, si vous ne
cherchez toujours que la verite et jamais la votre. Vous pouvez tre
bien sur que si vous ne vous attachez a une idee qu'a mesure que, sans

62 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

passion, sans personnalite, elle vous semble vraie, Dieu vous donnera
toujours une lumiere intellectuelle sur votre erreur, si vous y etes.

XXVIII

Oui, l'glise est toute positive, toute independante. C'est quelque
chose de bien plus grande qu'un anti-Protestantisme, qu'un anti-
Rationalisme. Souvent les convertis n'y voient que cela ; ce n'est que
la tres petite surface de la verite qui touche ces negations qui leur est
apparente. Moi aussi je ne cherche, je ne vois, dans les autres que ce
qui nous reunit. Ce n'est que par la part qu'elles ont a la verite que
les ames vivent ; aimons cette verite en elles, aidons-la a se developper
elle finira par etouffer 1'erreur.

XXIX

Non, vous n'etes point " catholique liberal." Vous etes beaucoup
plus dogmatique qu'ils ne 1'etaient, vous etes tres dogmatique. Aussi
s'occupaient-ils surtout de politique ; la politique n'est que peu ou rien
pour vous.

XXX

L' esprit pour vous, c'est un esprit de benediction de toute creature.

XXXI
Le miracle m'est tres antipathique.

XXXII

Ah, oui, voila ; n'allez pas plus loin : la saintete et la souffrance,
c'est la meme chose. Jamais vous ne ferez du bien aux autres, qu'en
souffrant, que par la souffrance. Notre Seigneur a gagne le monde,
non pas par ses beaux discours, par le sermon sur la Montagne, mais
par son sang, par sa douleur sur la croix.

XXXIII

Vous pensez, n'est-ce pas, a la maniere d'ecrire 1'histoire comme
1'a fait S. Jerome, quand il traite la fameuse dispute entre S. Pierre et
S. Paul comme une affaire a effet, arrangee d'avance. Ce n'est point
aimer Dieu, ce n'est point respecter sa Providence, que de chercher
ainsi, non la verite pleine et vivante, et d'edifier par la simple exposition
des volontes et permissions divines, mais de se fabriquer une petite idee
toute personnelle, a priori, du convenable, a laquelle on sacrifie tout.

XXXIV
Jamais vous ne vous sauverez par une mutilation.

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 63

XXXV

Pour vous, tout ce qui se rattache a la creature aura toujours la
beaute du pathetique, du contraste entre 1' ideal et la realite, entre ce que
les individus et les institutions symbolisent et ce qu'ils sont.

APPENDIX II

REMARKS MADE BY BARON F. VON HUGEL AT A MEETING OF THE
COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO RELIGION IN THE ARMY, 1917.

" What I should like to make clear first is the point in Miss DougalFs
letter as to the need for being practical with the Tommy. Before the
war, before our inquiry, ends, we want to look at this thing properly.
I have now reached the age of sixty-five, and I have come through life
frowned at by people who think me a learned man and regard me as
incurably a German, one who always gets beyond the practical
question. Well, when I look back to the time of my own crisis, what
is it that I find ?

" A man like that workman from the Potteries has been won to the
frame of mind we want to see ; what is the fundamental thing which
has won him ? It is precisely the same thing as that which won myself,
now nearly half a century ago. He has had the privilege to come
across people who have impressed him with the fact which he never
knew before the fact of the richness of life and of religion. It is
impossible to confine any at all adequate statement of the richness of
life within the kind of formula that Tommy can understand ; and, if
we do not get him to feel that the richness is there, all round him and
within him, we shall never have him ; indeed it is not worth trying to
have him.

" People think, ' Oh, it is quite simple to grasp all that really
matters ! Why should we spend our time at the sort of things that do
very well for a poor devil like that silly German Baron ? ' It is folly
to think that, because the reality of life is not that I wish it were,
in that case, at all events, Tommy could have an easy time of it. Do
you consider it really a genuine frame of mind, to think that the world,
even for Tommy, is such a miserably poor thing that Tommy can
understand it at once ? We are sitting round a table, with the
assumption that we are going to find a formula that Tommy can under-
stand at once ; but, undoubtedly, there are huge surpluses, for him as
for us, and those surpluses the need for the sense that they exist that
is what we have to face. I cannot, for the life of me, see that that is
not the practical question, and I hope to show you, if I have time, that
I am right. I pray God that that amount of an impression may remain
from my poor words.

64 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

" Certainly, for myself, I know very well that, when my adolescence
came, it was that, the successful awakening me to the fact of deep
reality, encompassing me on every side, that saved me. When the
Roman Catholic Church came forward, it awoke the knowledge in me
of the immense world of richness into which I had been born, and in
the midst of which I had slumbered until then. Meanwhile, it had a
huge lot of pressing things to teach me. It gave me the idea that I had
to organise myself. Is that pedantic ? Is that notion, which came to
me then, pedantry ? Is my life since then a piece of pedantry ? I am
not a pedant I do not want to be a pedant kick pedantry to perdition !
That is not pedantry !

" You see what a danger we are in. Our good Chairman is so
humble and simple ; I am sure he thinks Tommy could teach him a
lot not only about courage, and friendship, and so on, but as to what
questions really matter, as to how to put them almost as to how to
answer them. We are going to reduce our Theology to ' Tommy-ness.'
Such a reduction would be foolish, would give us nonsense ; and you
see what a danger the Englishman runs of falling into that extreme.
Look at our upper-middle and upper classes ! Did you ever see such
boys ? They are boys throughout their lives they never get beyond
it. That is why Nonconformists, as a rule, are so refreshing to me ;
I am comfortable with them ; if I get among a lot of jolly, middle-class
Nonconformists, I feel at home. Look at the young men from our
large Public Schools ; they have not had the boy knocked out of them ;
it will remain in them to the end of the chapter the self-consciousness
of the boy, the boy who does not dare to come out of his skin, the
boy who is ashamed to be even accused of thinking. You have there
something, if you like, that is not intellectualist, or subtle, or Greek ;
it is, I suppose, English, but slipshod, go-as-you-please, a poor kind
of Englishness.

" And then, again, those classes pride themselves upon escaping the
unhappy tendency to extremes of truth and of religion, they have
found something in the middle. It is not the truth which includes the
extremes that draws them, somehow ; but they keep looking nervously
to see that they carefully keep outside of and exactly between those
poles of fact and thought. To be operative those poles must be alive
within me, and above me, and not be complacently smiled at by me as
outside and beneath me. I had an old grandfather, with a funny fad
of telling us grandchildren always to put things in the very middle of
the table, but, of course, the via media did not work out right in that
case ; the things accumulated so in the middle, we had to put them
right down to the two ends.

" I think, myself, that, with Tommy on the one hand, who knows
nothing, and the upper-middle classes on the other hand who are

THE MEMOIR OF VON HttGEL 65

ashamed of knowing something, there is a very great danger that we
shall end in putting forward the wrong programme. By all means let
it remain as simple as possible. Indeed, literal simplicity would be the
right note, if it could only convey what neither Professor Cairns nor
any other human mortal can ever properly fully articulate : the richness
of life. All the Churches, all the Chapels, have got a marvellous
advantage over the ordinary, simple individual. Without richness,
without suggesting entire worlds, our message would lack all, pro-
foundly, in truth, I do feel that so strongly. There are things beyond
Tommy, and, the minute he wakes up to this primary fact, we shall
have a sign that he is saved.

" I will now, if I may, go on to the Christology : I may have the
misfortune of being an involuntary ' has-been ' now ; but, when I
was 19, I was not that ; then the passions burned within me, they
would have burnt up any house of cards like the excessive, abstractive
Christocentrism I am now thinking of ! What was it that gave me to
Christianity at that moment ? When you get an orthodoxy of any
kind, the danger is that it inevitably tends left to itself to be respect-
able, to be model, to be correct ' take care not to burn your skirts to
the right-hand side or to the left.' Such an orthodoxy inclines so to
exalt Christ above all Prophets and Philosophers, the Church above all
non-religious groups, the Reason, or Reasoning, or obedience, or safety,
above the nobler among the passions Courage, Initiative, Love of any
and every kind and degree of beauty, truth and goodness as to abolish
the friction, and to withdraw the material, always necessary for the full
fruitful operation of Christ, of Church, of Reason, of Obedience and
Safety, within man's many-sided life. It was long before one who saw
and who lived this with a burning vividness came who taught me this ;
I never saw this great spiritual law by myself alone. It was he who
saved me completely ; and more than ever the life (well within, and
through, and for the Roman Church) was one rich in the working,
richer still in the apprehension of it, and richest in the glimpses of it, -
glimpses which surpassed so greatly all that little working of it and all
that hardly larger clear apprehension of it. The whole thing, in that
great leader, was on fire. It was granite on fire, such as grand old
Dr. Temple was said to be. At its best, this rich, burning life comes
from the Churches at their best. Mr. Tatlow gave me such pleasure
when he spoke about all that.

"As to Our Lord : I want us so much to be careful. Let us not
underline St. Paul too much ; he is the first of our cataclysmic converts
do take him, for Heaven's sake, ' cum grano ' ! God has, in various
degrees, in various ways, been coming into the world ever since He
made it. It is a certain kind, the supreme kind, of incarnation (which
gives their completion, interpretation, and standard to all those lesser

66 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

preveniences) that we find and adore in the incarnation of Christ. If
you raise Christ simply outside of every other manifestation of God,
there is a danger of thinking, ' Because my flesh is not my spirit, it is
simply bad.' Because Plato and Socrates were not Christ, they are not
sheer nothings ; still less are Amos, Isaiah, or Akiba sheer nothings.
It will not do ; it will not do ! Plato's and Socrates' work was a touch
of the real God working within them ; and still more was this the case
with those great Jewish prophets and teachers whom, with the Synagogue,
the Christian Church reveres."

APPENDIX III

ROUGH NOTES t BY BARONESS HILDEGARD VON HUGEL

My father was the most lovable of men. When we were children
he loved to play with us. My earliest recollection is of him carrying
me on his shoulders singing Gilbert and Sullivan operas to us. In fact,
when we were quite babies, we knew " Pinafore " and " lolanthe "
almost by heart through him.

He took the greatest interest in our religious and also general
education, engaging our governesses himself and examining us twice
a year himself. His friends laughingly told him that his examinations
of us were far more exacting than those of Public Schools or even the
Universities. Gertrud, my eldest sister, always gave him great happi-
ness in her work ; she had a very good mind and memory and was most
keen to learn. I had neither, but he was so understanding and gentle
with me over it, never forcing me unduly and always appreciating and
stimulating any practical usefulness he might find in me, and always
gentle over my lack of memory, for which he naturally would have had
no understanding, as his own memory was simply amazing until the
very end of his life. All through my life he took the very greatest
interest in anything that interested me, though it was probably quite
other and outside any interests of his own. But his wonderful sympathy,
and humble, keen wish to learn from anyone, made him such a marvellous
companion and friend all through my childhood as well as in mature life

He loved nature, and taught us about birds and animals and trees
on our constant walks with him. Our holidays we always spent together,
and he used to love to go long rambles with us over the Malvern Hills,
coming back in the evenings to delightful readings of, in early days,
Scott and Dickens, and, later, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith,
Browning, etc. At Clonboy, Evelyn de Vesci's house, where he went
often, he would sit in the garden reading Schiller and Goethe to an
old German maid of Lady de Vesci's and our dear old nurse who has
been in our family some forty-three years and who nursed him, with
the Sisters, so devotedly to his death.

THE MEMOIR OF VON H0GEL 67

He was always most kind and considerate to servants and all those
about him always going at Christmas to choose them their Christmas
presents himself.

In spite of his great deafness, he always made friends with all the
people he came in contact with in post offices and shops, etc., so that he
was on friendly terms with everyone. Little children loved him and
would always come up to him in Kensington Gardens, rather than to less
formidable people, to ask the time or talk to him. He loved homely,
simple people, and never felt anyone too ignorant or small to try and do
his best for. A parlour-maid of ours evinced great interest in her
religion and used to come to him for advice and instruction, as she
belonged to the Catholic Evidence Guild. On one occasion she answered
some questions put to her so ably that the Cardinal and several ecclesiastics
present asked her who had taught her so well. She promptly answered
"The Baron" ; and she would often be seen on her knees asking his advice
over answers to the questions that had been asked her in the Park.

He was the most faithful friend. In spite of his health, which had
always curtailed his energies, he never would let it interfere when it
came to giving sympathy and interest to people who wrote to him in
distress, or came to him, as they did from all over the world, for help
and advice. I used sometimes to begrudge the labour and pains he took
in answering some very trivial and superficial person who wrote to him
long pages of doubts, etc., but to whom he gave his whole mind and failing
strength to advise, to stimulate to greater faith, more perseverance, etc.

If ever one was tempted to doubt or grow slack, to think for
a moment of my father and see that bent head in adoration before his
God, is enough to stimulate and revivify the flickering lamp to any of the
souls he has dealt with, I feel sure.

NOTE AS TO THE LETTERS

I have to thank all those who supplied letters in response to a request
made through some newspapers and reviews. Naturally, I have not
been able to make use of all those so kindly lent. Except in a few
instances I have not asked for letters except in this public way.

The letters now published are only a small minority of those written
by the Baron. He had long and consecutive correspondence with many
friends in France, Italy, and Germany such as M. Loisy, Archbishop
Mignot, M. Maurice Blondel, Professors Troeltsch, Eucken, Sauer,
and many others, as I know from their letters preserved by him ; but,
with one or two exceptions, I have not received his letters to them, nor
have I made much effort to obtain them.

Many of the Baron's letters were concerned with temporary phases
and tactics in the Modernist movement, not of lasting interest, and

68 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

many others were critical, approving or questioning, comments to his
friends, or even to strangers, upon their own books or utterances, which
they sent to him, with detailed references to passages. These com-
ments, also, would not be of much use to readers who had not before
them the books under comment.

I have, therefore, in my selection been guided, as a rule, by the aim
of choosing, mainly, those letters which most vividly make manifest
the mind and heart of the writer, and are of personal and biographical
interest. After all, his philosophic and critical results are fully set out
in his various published works, and many of his letters give thoughts
afterwards, often in almost the same words, embodied in his books.

It will be noticed that almost all the following letters are those
written within the last twenty-five years of his life of seventy-three
years. The reason is (i) that earlier letters are always more likely
to have been destroyed, or can less easily be disengaged from their
hiding-places, especially where their recipients have often long been
gone, and (2) that as, rather late in life, the Baron became more widely
known, his letters, especially to English friends, increased in number
and were more carefully preserved.

I do not think this a disadvantage. Letters written when the
character has been fully formed, and lying condensedly near- to each
other in point of date, give a more massive impression of the writer than
if they are scattered over a long life, beginning, as so often in such
publications, with a letter " Written to his Mother at six years old,"
and following through all the stages of immaturity. Such, at least, is
my own feeling. And if these letters show nothing of Friedrich von
Hiigel's youth in the ordinary sense, yet they do breathe the wonderfully
youthful freshness which in him endured to the end, and never faded.
He himself wrote in 1913 :

" Aubrey de Vere, the Catholic Poet, was 87 when he went, and
I saw him repeatedly every year till close upon his end j and James
Martineau, the Unitarian Preacher and Philosopher, was 92 when
I conferred with him for the first and last time. And both these other-
wise very different men exhaled a freshness which refused to fade, and
they carried with them a steady tonic influence which now, some
twenty years since they last braced me, is with me still."

These words, which he wrote to show the effect of religion as
a Fontaine de Jouvence, apply exactly, also, to Friedrich von Hugel.

BERNARD HOLLAND.

HARBLEDOWN LODGE,

Near Canterbury.

1926.

THE LETTERS OF BARON VON HUGEL

To Basil Champneys

Pension Lermann, 62 Via Buoncompagni,

Rome : Dec. 13, 1896.

Dear Mr. Champneys, I have been thinking so much of you
during these last few days, ever since reading of Mr. Patmore's death
in the Tablet, that it will be a real relief to me to write and tell you so,
and of how sorry I am to think that that now turns out to have been
the first and last time I saw him, that day on which you so kindly got
me to know him, and when we all three went out on to the Heath,
and there sat down, below the Flag-Staff. You must be already missing
him much, and will be doing so more and more, although you were
hardly, I fancy, quite unprepared for such an event. At least, I remem-
ber your telling me, I think the last time we met, that his heart's
action was getting bad and alarming.

I like so much to think that I owe that sight of him to you, and
that you and I can, on the subject of him also, so heartily sympathise,
and can vie in admiration of that combination of deep and quiet passion
of positive conviction with a fine distinction of mind and an open and
uncontroversial spirit : a combination, necessarily but none the less
sadly, rare at all times, but surely rarer than ever in these days of the
apparent triumph of the rule of thumb.

It is such men, such combinations as that, that I find I must do all
I can to cultivate, and that, not for their sake, but for my own. Such
an unimpoverished believer, such a rich and by Faith still further enriched
mind I have been having such happy intercourse with at Genoa, in the
person of that most refreshing creature, Padre Semeria, the Barnabite ;
and here too, I try to learn much from two who are like that.

I hope you will not drop Wilfrid Ward, but will be seeing him,
if not at Hampstead, at least at the Athenaeum. Without Patmore's
poetic gift, he has much of his all-round perception and of his candid
straightness of outlook. And Ward would I know be very glad, for he
has much to learn from you.

I have just been finishing up, at last, James Seth's A Study of Ethical
Principles (Blackwood). What a noble and delightful book it is !

70 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

Do read him some day. And if you write on Patmore, don't forget
please to let me see your performance : you would be sure to do it so
well.

Yours, my dear Mr. Champneys, very sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To Mrs. Henry Drew, on the death of her father, Mr. W. E. Gladstone

4 Holford Road : May 23, 1898.

Dear Mrs. Drew, Mary wrote her letter of condolence to you on
Saturday, without my knowing that this was so : I had wanted so much to
add a line of my own, and I now venture to add one more note to the
many, the endless number, that will be reaching you still.

It would indeed be conceit and pretentiousness, were I to attempt
to praise or to discriminate. But I should much like to say one little
word, though thousands have felt and said it already, each in their own
way. Still, it is most entirely sincere, and hence may have its little
place and little fruitfulness. It is this : that there is surely, for us
Christians, no surer test of Faith on our part, nor truer proof of Love on
God's part, than suffering nobly borne, and fully sent, and nothing that
unites and reunites at all as does such suffering. And, if we all, and
I with all, believed most truly in your ever admirably active and earnest
Father's goodness, even at a time when he could but show it by his
actions, and when, from the very nature of the case, one could not
always subscribe to more than his intentions : it was and is a consolation
for us all, and for myself with all, a pathetic and costing consolation,
to have, during these months of most touching heroism, been most
respectfully and completely at one with you his near and dear ones,
in gratitude to God for the example and inspiration He has deigned to
give us in your Father. I have always loved to think of devoted suffering
as the_highest, purest,_perhaps the only quite pure jorm of action : and
so it was a special grace and specially appropriate, that one as devoted and
as active as your Father, should have been allowed and strengthened to
practise the most devoted action possible for a sentient and rational
creature of God.

I am, dear Mrs. Drew, with deep sympathy with you all,

Yours sincerely,
FR. VON HUGEL.

We were so pleased that our good old Priest up here told us, his
Congregation, yesterday, twice, how much we all owed to your Father's
noble life and example, as Husband, Father, Citizen, Statesman, and
above all as Christian. It is most true, and we all thank God it is so.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 71

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : Sept. 26, 1898.

In the midst of the pangs of literary production I venture to trouble
you with a few, I fear very selfish lines, all except the first point, which
is simply to send you the enclosed letter from Blondel, which, I think,
will interest you, if only because of the paragraph about your own
Sabatier paper. We have quite settled not to leave England (this, and
Herbert House) before the beginning of February, and have almost
settled to at least begin our little three months' foreign outing, by (after
a week or so of Paris) a stay at Aix, taking Lyons, with Abbe Tixeront
and Pere Bremond, on the way. If you have any criticisms to make,
in G.'s interest, you will kindly let me have it sometime before Christ-
mas : it is, of course, above all in her interest that I have striven to
avoid Rome this year, and wished to stay in England as long and much
as possible. You will kindly let me have it back sometime, perhaps
when we meet, as I hope so much we may any time in or after the second
half of next week, till then all my poor brains must go to my St. Catherine
article, only two-thirds written, so far. The point I venture to put on
paper to you is this : I do not want to introduce it (however diplo-
matically) if you have any misgivings as to its soundness : but I must
say, it has come home to me more and more, the more I have studied
the mystical saints and writers, and the more I have come to find food
and light in one side of their teaching as, e.g., St. Catherine of Genoa,
and still more, St. John of the Cross.

My point is this, and it will be a kind charity, if you forgive my
drawing it out thus on paper to you, before (perhaps) at least implying
it in public (I could and of course gladly would show you the thing
when in its proposed final form, but I want first of all to be quite clear
as to my own point and its legitimacy to and for myself : I must know it,
as I think I do already, to be true, before I cast about how to put it
fruitfully to others). B

Well, then, it seems to me that the Mystics, I am of course thinking
of the ecclesiastically approved ones, and the whole mystical element
in the teaching of all saints (I say " teaching " deliberately, for I think
their practice generally comes round to what I would like to see modified
in our present-day theory of the matter), are profoundly right on the
following points :

(1) God, our own souls, all the supreme realities and truths,
supremely deserving and claiming our assent and practice, are both
incomprehensible and indefinitely apprehensible, and the constant vivid
realisation of these two qualities insuperably inherent to all our know-
ledge and practice of them, is of primary and equal importance for us.

(2) This indefinite apprehensibleness becomes an actual ever-in-

72 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

creasing apprehension, more through the purification of the heart than
through the exercise of the reason, and without some experience (follow-
ing no doubt upon some light) the reason has no adequate material for
effective conclusions.

(3) The primary function of religion is not the consoling of the
natural man as it finds him, but the purification of this man, by effecting
an ever-growing cleavage and contrast between his bad false self, and the
false, blind self-love that clings to that self, and his good true self, and
the true, enlightened self-love that clings to the true self; and the
deepest, generally confused and dumb, aspirations of every human
heart, correspond exactly to, and come from precisely the same source,
as the external helps and examples of miracle, Church or Saint. The
true exceptional is thus never the queer, but the supremely normal, and
but embodies, in an exceptional degree, the deepest, and hence exceptional
longings of us all.

(4) This purification must take place by man voluntarily plunging
into some purifying bath or medium of a kind. necessarily painful to the
false, surface, immediate, animal man, and necessarily purifying where
willed and accepted by the true, inner, remoter, spiritual self.

And now I have reached the points where I would part company
with them.

(5) They teach as far as possible (their practice is generally fuller
and about all I want) that the soul gains this purification by turning
away from the particular, by abstraction, and absorption more and more
in the general, as leading away from the particularity of the creature to
the simplicity of the Creator. There seems, I think there actually is,
no logical place in this theory for science, at least experimental, observing
science ; and the motives for (ever-costing) reform in and of this visible
world are weakened or destroyed.

I would like the teaching to run thus :

(a) As the body can live only by inhaktion and exhalation, nutrition
and evacuation, etc. ; and as the mind can only flourish by looking out
for sensible material and then elaborating and spiritualising it : so the
soul can live, to be fully normal in normal circumstances, only by a double
process : occupation with the concrete and then abstraction from it,
and this alternately, on and on. If it has not the latter it will grow
empty and hazy, if it has not the former, it will grow earthly and heavy.

(b) Humanity at large is under the strict obligation (this, not simply
because of the necessities of life, but because of its spiritual perfection)
to practise both these activities ; but at different periods excesses among
the many of one or other of these activities, justify and require counter-
balancing, rectifying excesses of the opposite kind. And as the many will
necessarily only exceed in the concrete direction, the compensating
activity of the few will be in the abstracting direction. Still, the most

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 73

difficult and yet most complete and most fruitful condition, and therefore
the ideal, would be the plunging into the concrete and coming back
enriched to the abstract, and then returning, purified and simplified, from
the abstract to transform and elevate the concrete.

(f) The occupation with the concrete (I am primarily thinking of
experimental science, critical scholarship, etc.) has profoundly changed
or deepened its character, in proportion as the idea of law, of certain
conditions, inexorably inherent to each observing mind, and to all
observed matter, has become the necessary key to all work. Nature,
history, all subjects of research first of all, now, present us with laws,
with things, as neither the clamours of the petty self in front of them,
nor, at first sight, the intimations of the Divine Person behind and above
them, find here an echo or a place. Nothing breaks the purifying
power of the thing and its apparent fatefulness ; the apparent determinism
of the phenomena and the mentally and emotionally costing character
of their investigation I think the God of all phenomena as of all reality has
now given us in these a purifying medium, which as many will and ought
to use as have, in the past, striven to use the medium of abstraction alone.

(d) The recollecting of the soul, and its turning back to its own
central necessities and dependence upon God, would of course remain
exactly as they were, and as absolutely necessary ; only the running
away from, or minimising, or illogical tacking on of, an occupation with
the world around would cease : it would on the contrary have its normal
necessary place in the very theory of spirituality : and every man would
be taught in Retreats etc. that he must study or work at something
definite and concrete, not simply to escape the dangers of idleness or to
take off the strain of direct spirituality, but because, without them, he
will, as we now know and see things, avoid one of the two twin means
of growing lowly and pure, and of removing himself from the centre of
his (otherwise little) world.

It would be easy, I think, to show how, even still in St. Catherine's
day, science represented by such fantastic anthropocentric conceptions
as those of Paracelsus, and scholarship, by such pretentious omniscience
as that of Pico della Mirandola, could not as yet be the ready found
purification I think they both can now be easily turned to ; and
inasmuch as there was an inherent repugnance to all that is particular
and concrete, one would have, I think, however carefully and respect-
fully, to admit that this was and is a confusion or theoretical miscon-
ception : for Blondel is surely right at least where he says that the true
Absolute and Universal springs for us from the true concrete and
particular : God, I like to think with Lotze, is the supremely concrete,
supremely individual and particular, and the mental and practical occupa-
tion with the particular must ever remain an integral part of my way to
Him. And this squares so grandly with the whole sacramental doctrine

74 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

and practice of the Church. One gets otherwise into a Neo-Platonic
depersonalising of the soul.

You will please forgive me : it has profited me, even if you cannot
answer much or anything.

Yours ever most gratefully and sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : Nov. zi, 1898.

My dear Father Tyrrell, I am so sorry to have again to trouble
you but one of my two points need give you no trouble at all.

(1) I have carefully read, and much enjoyed Emmanuel de Broglie's
St. Vincent de Paul, in the English translation. Miss Partridge,
I suppose I have the prefix right, has done her work very well, it
seems to me, although I judge without the original before me. I have
come across but few printer's or translator's slips, and only here and
there a passage which is obscure and would deserve improving. The
enclosed slip might be worth handing on to her, with a view of recon-
sidering these few places : I always think such suggestions among the
most sincere forms of genuine appreciation.

(2) The publisher of the Hampstead Annual has proposed to me
to publish, at his own risk and expense, a little book on St. Catherine
of Genoa, and the questions suggested by her life, something six times
the length of the article as finally accepted. It has 3000 words,
1 6 large print 8vo pp. ; I would now be given 24,000 words, and
1 20 pp. large print I2mo. I have accepted, since, as soon as pleases
God I am physically all right again, and I am going on well, and can
hope to be at normal work again, I think, by Christmas, it would,
I think, be an actual relief and bracing, to be able to unfold at a reason-
able length what I have vainly tried to pack into those short pages ;
and indeed, even now, I have MS ready to fill, I think, quite 60 of
these 1 2mo pages. I want to try and carefully abstain from introducing
any new points, and simply to attempt working out, as soberly and clearly
as possible, the points I have, or had, indicated. I would make five
chapters of it : (i) Introductory ; (2) The Life ; (3) Sanity and
Sanctity ; (4) Exterior Work and Interior Recollection ; (5) Pan-
theism and Personality, and each chapter could be a little longer than
my present whole article. Now my good little publisher, formerly with
Macmillan, and hardly started as a publisher, is naturally anxious to
insure himself against his venture turning out a financial failure, and
thinks he would gain an important point, if some writer, well known
or better known than myself, would undertake to write a preface to
the little book, and thus god-father the child, in this rough world of
ours. He even proposed his patron, Canon Ainger j but I told him

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 75

I was sure that, if I have an Introducer, he ought, for a purely religious
book as this, to be one of my own people. He then proposed either
yourself, or Dom Gasquet, or Wilfrid Ward. I told him that Dom G.
would not do, partly because we have, for these last two or three years,
been on a less cordial footing and, perhaps still more, because he has
always made no secret of his fear and dislike of even the moderate
Mystics ; and that Wilfrid Ward would hardly do, because, far better
known and more practised writer than myself as I recognise him,
I thought the relations indicated by such a preface should be real, and
that, in this case, such a preface would be pretty well reversing the usual
roles between Ward and myself. That towards you, on the contrary, I
did not feel this, and knew very well, that, if you could and did write such
an Introduction, it would add intrinsic value to the book, and would,
I thought, probably facilitate and increase its sale amongst Catholics.
As to outsiders, I did not know ; but Mayle thought that the kind of
non-Catholics at all likely to buy such a book would not mind S.J. upon
the title-page, and would attend to your recommendation. Anyhow,
I promised him to write and ask you ; and told him I thought you would
probably, in any case, be willing to give your most valuable help in reading
over the proofs. I hope it is not impolite, and rudely simple, if I put
it to you, you who, if there had better be a preface, I so much hope
will write it, whether you think there had better be one, or not. I
do not feel nearly as sure there had better be one, as Mayle does.
Mr. Champneys is against one. I had thought of thanking in my
preface Eucken, Loisy, and yourself, for kindness in discussing points
with me, and then specially yourself for looking over the proofs, and
putting this latter service in such a way, as, if necessary, to reassure any
timid Catholics as to the substantial orthodoxy of what I say. I do not
know how far an S.J. is free to approve of a book, which has not itself
been submitted to the theologians of his order ; for, I take it, for me to
do the latter would be to sacrifice one of the advantages of my position,
which I can hope to utilise for helping matters on.

There is no hurry in this matter, as far as I am concerned, since
I shall only be reading up slowly, in the books already utilised, till
Christmas. But Mayle is anxious to get all the preliminaries settled,
and this preface business largely fills his soul. I take it, he could in
any case be promised respectful notices in the Guardian (perhaps Gore,
or Champneys), Tablet (perhaps Dom Butler), Spectator (Ward ?). And
one of yours, yourself perhaps, might say a kind word in the Month.
All this looks sadly like log-rolling. But I see two things : that
I cannot afford, at present at least, to publish at my own expense, and
that my little man won't do so at his, unless he gets his preface or promises
or something.

Gertrud has still got, at Herbert House, your Hard Sayings,

76 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

That is one of the books I want to read before finally working out my
paper : the very titles of the sections show how much stimulation
I shall find there.

Please kindly forgive this long epistle, and believe me, ever

Yours very sincerely and gratefully,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : June 18, 1899.

I have to thank you, and I do so most gratefully, for your very kind
note ; for What is Mysticism ? ; the rendering of Silvio Pellico's
Dio Amore ; and now also for External Religion.

As to your letter I can only say, most sincerely, that I am always
most deeply grateful to God for the bracing, penetrating helpfulness of
your life and ideas, writings and conversation ; and that I shall always,
please God, esteem any interview you may manage to procure for me
as a very real advantage. I should be so glad to think that as often as you
could and at all cared to come up here, you would kindly do so, without
any special invitation, and with but a P.C. in the morning to give me
fair warning to be in. As you know, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
Saturdays are my best afternoons, but almost any day, lunch and early
afternoon are possible to me. I too, you must feel it sympathetically,
am much and often, indeed constantly, disciplined, as our all-good and
all-wise Lover knows how, by that isolation and interior loneliness
which I notice is the marked lot and badge of all my close friends,
men who have constantly to fall back upon God to help make and keep
them true lovers and helpers of their kind. And like these great large-
hearted lonely ones, Huvelin, Blondel, Laberthonniere, Duchesne,
Eucken, and one or two more abroad, I have so far found amongst
our now living English Catholics but one, yourself. I have, thank God,
a fair number of English Catholic scholar friends, and amongst non-
Catholics I have, also on this side of the Channel, several good and
much-cared-for friends : but there is, amongst the Catholic Englishmen
I now know, somehow no other one whom I feel and see to be one of
those self-spending children of the dawn and of Christ's ampler day.
May God keep and preserve you, ever more and more along this costing,
but alone fully fruitful, line of light and life and love !

Miss Maude Petre came up last Monday : I was deeply consoled
and refreshed at the ample proof our long talk afforded, of how fully
and deeply that living mystical way of taking religion is working in
her : I hope that she too will continue to give me such conversations
as that one.

As to your writing, I have read and have been much touched by

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 77

the Dio Amore, although I do not, alas, know the original ! But the
article I have not yet been able to read : I will do so, very carefully.
But above all do I look forward to the book : the very table of contents
shows me how entirely you have been along the lines most specially
dear to me : in fact they are the only ones along which the Church
can live and prosper. All my little strength has now to be husbanded
for the poor book, but this book of yours will, of course, be grist to
my mill. . . .

Yours very gratefully and affectionately,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

Oct. 8, 1899.

... I want to thank you at once, most gratefully, for the proofs
of " The Relation of Theology to Devotion " article. I have already
read them, twice over, most carefully. They strike me as the finest
thing you have yet done, at least of those that I have read. It is
really splendid. I thank God for it with all my heart. It is of course
a deep encouragement to me in my work, not only my book, but my
poor life's work generally, which is so entirely on these lines, which
aims at them, to find you giving such crystal-clear expression to my
dearest certainties, to the line of thought and living which alone can
and does bring me light and strength ; and to find too, that you are let
say these things, in your Order and by your Order.

To the Same

40 Via Montebello, Florence : Dec. 4, 1899.

... I have much to thank you for, and much to tell. For one
thing, here is the charming little Duchesne note back. I am sure you
value it at its true worth, for the fact is that, if he is always sincerity
itself and indeed fastidious in his taste and praise, I have, I think, never
yet known him to praise, or indeed carefully to read through, anything
philosophical. It is but one proof the more how admirably direct and
immediately practical and effective, how rarely lucid that article of
yours is. I kept back the note till now, as I thought you would let
me read it to various friends in Paris and Genoa, as probably the best
reinforcement of my propaganda in favour of your writings. Then,
next, I have to thank you for the very kind and handsome words of your
letter to me. I am, of course, very glad and grateful to God, and why
not to you also ? if I have been of any use, along a way which is so dear
to me, I should love to think that it was the secret aspiration and

78 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

inspiration of my whole life : it certainly is so, of what may be not
unworthy in it. And then, your External Religion. I have, at last ! read
it all, most carefully, mostly twice and three times, and with great satis-
faction practically everywhere, and with deep delight in certain crucial
passages. The skilful way in which you work the Earthly Paradise doc-
trine and picture (pp. 9, 84), and give the Fall-doctrine an exclusively
human and spiritual application (13, 14), and make miracle a stretching
of the physical under the pressure of the spiritual (15) ; the truly splendid
teaching about the immanental and the historic, external Christ, and their
proper functions and relations (3036) ; the capital passage about the
possibility and conditions of independence (70-72) ; the deep truth as
to no two minds conceiving God or Christ identically ; the rules of
true helpfulness (8 184) ; effort great in proportion to degree of sanctity,
hence greatest in Our Lord and His Mother (85, 86); "pray and
watch " interpreted as " orate ut vigiletis " (88, 89) ; the noble protest
against the elimination from religion of all its mystery and splendour
(119, 120); the insistence upon conceiving grace as mingling with
nature (146) ; perhaps above all, as practically clenching the whole
argument, the sentences on pp. 149, 150 : " Can you explain . . .
we who have once felt can never doubt it" ; " It is vitally important
. . . however skilfully spun" ; " Faith is produced . . . in a look or a
word." All this has been and will, I trust and think, up to the end of
life, be a deep and fruitful delight to me. But indeed there are many
more pages which I like hardly less than these ; but I have to be brief,
and need only say, in one word, that I accept and subscribe to the whole
of your argument with glad and grateful readiness.

I think that in what strikes me as its two main doctrines, the
unconscious or variously obscure, but most real and, when favoured,
powerful presence within us of an inward Christ pushing us upwards
and outwards with a view to join hands with the outward Christ Who
is pressing inwards, these two as necessary conditions for the appre-
hensions of Faith and Love ; and the illuminative character of action,
which makes the Christianity of the individual soul continually to
re-begin with an experiment, and re-conclude by an experience, that
in these two main points it is entirely Blondel and Laberthonnierian, but,
of course, with all the sound and sane mystics generally. How nobly
and rightly modern these doctrines are, modern only, after all, in the
sense of being also modern, for they are at bottom of and for all times,
indestructible as Life and Love themselves. If I may criticise :
I. I would hope that you could somehow restate, on p. 51, the thought
expressed by the words : " mysteries of an entirely supernatural order,
of which there is to be found no hint or suspicion in the natural aspir-
ations of even the noblest, most immaculate soul." Perhaps it is asking
for too much discrimination in any one passage, but I always long so

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 79

much to find everywhere a clear distinction between what I take to be
the two very different questions : (i) as to how far, without the help
of supernatural light and grace, man can have even a suspicion of the
supernatural truths and facts of Christianity, and I would gladly
answer, that he cannot thus have it ; and (2) as to how far such help
is given or denied to any man, if not at any moment, at least at various
stages and turning-points of his life, and here I would strongly insist
that every man everywhere is given such help, in of course endlessly
varying degrees. This latter doctrine I think you hold, and indeed
proclaim in this your book as strongly as even I could wish ; but with
this doctrine the matter becomes one requiring, I think, some such
words here as : " the merely natural aspirations," or something like
them. 2. I ask myself whether on your otherwise admirable-p. 85
there is not perhaps a confusion between the effort of doing always
better and better, and at each moment the best, and the effort and
suffering involved in avoiding sin ; and whether it would not be sufficient
to keep the former only for Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin. Still
I see how even such a limitation (of course, even so you would be well
ahead, on a most necessary point, of our poor at bottom docetic manner
of looking at this question) empties Our Lord's temptations of at least
some of their mystery and helpfulness. 3. On p. 82 you have " our per-
sonality and individualism," and throughout the book the second word
recurs, bearing, I think, no definite connotation of either praise or blame.
I think it was James Seth, in his attractive Study of Ethical Principles,
who taught me to strive after helping to fix in English a distinction
between "individuality," in a good sense, and "individualism," in a
bad. " Personality " would in any case remain the highest term, and
one absolutely above reproach. I should much like to see you, too,
always using these terms in this way. 4. On pp. 1 29, 1 30, you at least
seem to waver between the conception that the Church's prominence in
the world depends upon our efforts, and that according to which it does
not so depend. I note that your words do make some distinction :
still, I wonder, even after rereading them, whether it would not be
truer simply to say that Our Lord has not guaranteed more than that the
Church would continue to exist to the end of the world, but in what
state and degree of attractiveness would depend upon ourselves. 5. On
pp. 149, 151, you say "those that are true to conscience, recognise
exactly the same voice in Christ and in the Church " ; and " if a
conscientious Christian resists Catholicity, it is only because the truth
has not yet been duly set before him ; God's voice has not been allowed
to sound alone in his ears," etc. At first I tried to read the first sentence
as meaning that such a Catholic as leads a life faithful to his conscience,
will know by experience that conscience, Christ, and Church, all three
speak the same language and lessons. But the second sentence seems

8o VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

to show that that is not your meaning, and that you really teach here,
what you so rightly and clearly deny elsewhere, that if only a man is
fully faithful to his light, he will, here below even, come to the explicit
acceptance of the Church : at least his not coming is not from any
insufficiency of clearness in God's call to his individual soul. But I
take it, that this will not work, and that it would be just exactly blurring
the edges of the mystery which Catholics require so constantly keeping
before them, viz. that though there is but one Truth, one Way, one
Goal ; and though Catholicism is the full and ultimate earthly form
of all true religion, yet that our God, all-wise, all-good, all-powerful
as He is, gives to different souls, even though they be equally faithful,
different degrees of this same Truth, and starts them at various distances
from the goal, along the same road. No one sees or teaches this more
plainly than yourself : it must, then, be some little obscurity in your
text or density in myself that boggles over your words here.

As to things to say, I have more than I can write. Still, I want
to say at once, that, during those but two full days in Paris, I managed
twice to see Bremond, distinctly depressed and wistful, but valiantly
working away at getting a good circle of friends to give to and get from,
and at keeping foolish things out, and getting reasonable things into,
the Etudes. I think he is very sensitive as to the uncertainty as to
even many Catholics' feelings towards, not him personally, but himself
qua S.J. I have managed though, I hope, to increase his circle by three
or four capital and most active persons, friends of Huvelin's or Duchesne's,
Then I went out to Bellevue, and saw that valiant Loisy, all pale or
rather yellow from his bad illness, and very weak, and as yet unable to
resume his writing ; but valiantly determined to do so as soon as possible,
and already reading a bit, and continuing to publish articles. Then,
too, I saw Abbe Touzard, that really excellent O.T. scholar and
Professor at S. Sulpice, pupil and friend of Loisy, and a lover and
understander of souls into the bargain. He feels naturally sad about
France, and told me as to how M. Stinnes Lamy and a few others had
wanted the Vatican to let them attempt to work in public and political
life, along thoroughly Christian and Catholic lines, but without looking
for political directions from Rome, and without identifying religion
with one political regime or group rather than another ; how this
would have been the beginning of salvation for religion in the country ;
but that the Vatican had been as plain and energetic in its refusal as
evidently its worst enemies could have desired. Sad.

And, finally, I had a good long talk with that capital Laberthonniere,
who told me that in the Grand Seminaire at Rheims, I think, one of
the Moral Theology Professor's cases of conscience is : " Supposing a
Subjectivist were to come to you, to Confession, how would you work
to free him from his error ? " Also, that Pere de la Barre has been

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 81

writing in a double and really hostile way about him. That he, L., is
intending to write a short Essay on Pascal, and manages to get now
about three hours' study a day, and gives this chiefly to preparing his
Dr.'s dissertation on " Charity." He also begged me to tell you, how
much he has enjoyed and appreciated your " Theology in Relation to
Devotion" article.

Then, at Genoa, our three whole days there were very happy, since
I managed to see that astonishingly rich-souled and overflowingly
expansive Semeria twice a day. He also introduced me to two young
Milanese nobles, friends and admirers of the good van Ortroy, and as
zealous and open-minded young Catholics as heart could desire. They
told me how that they held it direct from van Ortroy (a generally good
and accurate source of information) that now Laberthonniere has been
denounced to Rome, and that some censure might well come of it.
It is, alas, so evident that they really fear as much, and understand as
little, even sane and sober Mysticism, as they do critical and scientific
method. I have been thinking well over what little I could do to
help ward off what would be a blow delivered at deeply dear convictions
and influences ; and my difficulty is, partly, that many of those who are
entirely right on the dry, critical side of things, have nothing and will
know nothing of what I am profoundly convinced is its corrective and
supplement, mystical aspiration and action. The good V. O. himself,
for instance, and many others. I have ended by writing to Cardinal
Matthieu, who is open-minded at all events on historical points (he
volunteered to Loisy to at any time fight his battles for him at Rome,
where, as you know, he is resident French Cardinal), and to Cardinal
Perraud, who as himself an Oratorian, and as having, at M. Olle-
Laprune's instigation, worked some three or four years ago in Rome to
ward off a threatened blow from Blondel, can hardly in consistency, I
hope, now refuse to do the same for L. But he is a rhetorician : I doubt
whether he sees really very clearly or very far into anything. Mean-
while Semeria tells me, as to how the present Nunzio in Paris is the
most emphatic and active of Neo-Scholastics who (unless all these political
preoccupations absorb him too much) will no doubt do his best to dis-
courage or even if possible suppress all other tendencies. Padre Semeria
also begged me to tell you that he has found a good Italian translator
for Hard Sayings, that the work is already begun, and that he pro-
poses to carefully revise it and introduce it to the Italian public by a very
few carefully sober words ; that he supposes you will not object to this ;
and that he only hopes the publisher will not require payment for the
right of translation, as all S. will be able to do will be to find a publisher
who would take the risk of this first translation of any of your books
without having to pay. But, if not too much were asked, I could, and
gladly would pay this. Only, I hope such a translation will not be

G

82 VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS

imprudent ; S. thinks it would not be that. It is extraordinary what
things the Master of the Apostolic Palace has passed in S.'s own book
on the Acts of the Apostles ; e.g. that no miracle, actual or conceivable,
carries with it mathematically demonstrative force, but always requires
and tests moral and religious dispositions. I take it, they passed these
(excellent) things without understanding them.

Yours with ever grateful warm affection,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

40 Via Montebello, Firenze : Dec. 5, 1899.

It was a very real disappointment to me, not to have been able to
come to you on that Monday, my last afternoon in England. But
sudden and quite unforeseen family business called me away, two days
before, to Bournemouth, so that I had only those few afternoon hours
to attend to my many final odds and ends, and could not manage to find
room for our talk, so much looked-forward-to by me. As to the
German Mystics, I will, in the following list, (i) assume that you are not
taking them, at least primarily, as Spiritual Reading, but for critical
study ; I will, then, group them not in the order of their immediate
acceptableness, but in that of their power and influence upon subsequent
thought. I will (2) include the Low German, Old Flemish Mystics.
And I will (3) only give you translations direct from the originals.
(This latter point is, I think, very important, e.g. Hello's pretty little
French selection from Ruysbroek is, I think, insufficient for your pur-
pose, since it is a French translation from Surius's Latin translation of the
Middle-Low German original. I have just finished reading this latter,
as regards R.'s masterpiece, and find that Surius is very faithful.) Among
such translations I will always choose those made on the best, generally
the latest, text of the originals. But please note, that most of both the
originals and translations still only exist, printed, in quite old and largely
inadequate editions. The fact of- course is, that these good Mystics
have, for later times, fallen between two stools. For many Catholics
they have been " semi-Protestants," or " semi-Pantheists " ; for most
Protestants, Papists after all we must help changer tout cela. Let me
suggest that, before reading any of these German Mystics, you should
read :

(1) Select Works of Plotinus with Introduction. Engl. transla-

tion by John Taylor. London : Bell. 3*. 6d.

(2) The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite. Engl. tr. by Rev.

John Parker. London : Parker. 1899. 2 vols. 3*. net
each.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 83

(The translation seems to be well done ; but the translator
is utterly uncritical in his Preface : already, in the i6th
Century, the attribution of these writings to the Apostolic
age was cracked beyond all repairing.)

Of these writings I would read at least the " On the
Divine Names " and " On Mystical Theology." They
must both be in Vol. II.

As to the German Mystics, far and away the most important,
although the least, materially, orthodox (his intentions were admittedly
good and even saintly throughout), is Master Eckhart. All the others
(I include writers such as a Kempis, who are only incidentally Mystical)
are but modifications, corrections of the mighty Eckhart. Unfortu-
nately, his German writings, which are much the most characteristic,
can still only be read in their Middle-High German original (first
published by Franz Pfeiffer, Leipzig : Goschen. 1857. 686 pp.
of Text. I. no Sermons; II. 18 Treatises; III. 70 Sayings;
IV. " Liber Positionum," also M.-H. German !) But his Latin writings
have been carefully edited by Fr. H. S. Denifle, the Dominican (our one
living authority on the German Mystics, who has worked for years
to claim and use them fully for the Church), in Archm fur Litteratur-
und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, herausgeg. von Denifle a.
Ehrle. Berlin: Weidmann, 2ter Band, 1886. You will find here
an excellent introduction by Denifle on " Meister Eckhart's lateinische
Schriften, und die Grundanschauung seiner Lehre," pp. 417-532 ; and
then the text of the Latin writings, pp. 533-615. And then some
interesting documents concerning E.'s censure, 616-687. ^ tnm k these
two parts bound up as one cost 8 mks.

II. Tauler : Sermones (Latin translation by Surius. Cologne,
1548).

III. The Imitation of the Poor Life of Christ. English transla-

tion, from Denifle's (ist complete) edition of the M.-H.
German original (Munich, 1877). London : Burns &
Gates. (This book used to be attributed to Tauler, but
wrongly.)

IV. (Euvres Spirituelles du Btenh. Henri Suso (traduit du texte

publi6 par le Pere Denifle. Munich, 1880). 2 vols.
Paris. (I don't have the date and publisher handy, but the
book is easily procurable.)

V. Theologia Germanica. English tr. by Catherine Winkworth.
Macmillan ; Golden Treasury Series.

(See Charles Kingsley's Life and Letters, vol. 2, where
you will find that, though what has been left has been
carefully translated, some " Romanist " passages are omitted.

84 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

Miss W. and K. between them have also, I fancy, softened
one or two " pantheistic " passages. But there is no other
translation, Engl., Fr. or Lat., that I know of. The critical
edition of the original is Franz Pfeiffer's : Eine Deutsche
Theologie, 2nd Ed., Stuttgart, 1855, with Modern
German translation, in addition to the M.-H. German text.)
VI. Ruysbroek, Either : Opera, latine, ed. Surius, Cologne,
1552, and several later editions ; or Maeterlinck : Les
Ornementsdes Noces Sptrituelles, traduit du Vieux Flammand.
Paris, 1 88- or 189- (easily procurable, and quite cheap,
2 or 3 frs.).

If I may, in conclusion, point out what- seem to me the points we
ought to clear up and, as may be, either eliminate or emphasise from and
in the Mystics : I would say that they are three :

(1) To get rid of the Abstractive and Negative side of them, care-
fully and constantly, as a final stage, and as carefully keep them as means,
but means, and means alternating with other, contrary means : terrible
havoc has been worked along the opposite lines. It is delightful to find
how Just this weakness of so many of the Mystics is also ; ust what alone
makes them half- Catholic. To get and keep this point fully, constantly
right, is to kill two birds, two odious vultures preying at the vitals of
a most noble and most necessary element of religion, with one good
stone.

(2) To get rid of too hard and fast a line most of ours have dug
as deep a trench as possible between contemplative, mystical acts and
states, and the acts of the ordinary spiritual and even mental life.
Mysticism, indeed, anything and everything, becomes profoundly un-
interesting, and indeed a pure and simple irritant, except it bejconceived
as existing, in some form and degree, in every mind. Only in its intensity
and extension, in its quantity and quality will" it then differ in various
souls.

(3) To get rid of, I will not say abnormalities, for Joly already
and others have well done this, following in the footsteps of St. John
of the Cross and others : but of that dreary diabolic Mysticism business.
Without that, we merely pump in pure water at the top of our subject,
to have it pour out dirty and unwholesome at the bottom of it. Here
I would rely, I think, especially on the two universally admitted but often
woefully forgotten doctrines : that fear is ever only to take the place of
love, when (always through our own faults) love, the real King and
Vice-Regent of the soul, fails ; and that God alone can ever directly
touch our souls. Fight self constantly, and you need, never think of
the devil. You will notice that I look to find a position for our people
which would combine an admission of the nature of that side of the

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 85

spiritual world with a keen sense of the danger for us of dwelling on it,
primarily and directly.

Yours very sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : July 7, 1900.

. . . Then again, since writing I have read your capital last
"Synthetic" Paper, which somehow, though I knew of its existence, had
been overlooked amongst a mass of other papers. And I have got to
about the middle of the " Ignatius of Loyola " book. This ktter is being
a veritable storehouse to me of observations and suggestions, just exactly
suited to my present main occupation. I only hope that this great
service you have, here again, been rendering to the true and lasting
interests of religion may not, already again, raise any dust or turmoil,
however momentary. So far, I have neither seen nor heard anything
to in any way portend this. When I have quite done the full and
astonishingly pregnant little book, I hope to clear my brain by jotting
down to you such definite impressions (if any) which special turns or
interpretations of the book may suggest to me. I also duly read your
little letter in the Weekly Register so little yours, however, as to
be barely grammar and to show little sense. Yet I was, of course, very
glad that it amounted to so little, indeed it would be impossible to
specify what it amounted to.

Wilfrid Ward has lent me your MS. "Who are the Reactionaries ? ",
and I have found it, especially in its quotations from yourself, full of
deeply stimulating and suggestive writing, with that enchanting note
of spiritual aloofness and pathetic, patient, brave loneliness, which is
ever characteristic of one side and aspect of all spontaneous and deep
religion. I have had to express myself on paper to W. W. about these
matters, and have found it difficult and costing, not, I think, from real
uncertainty as to my own instincts and affinities, but because I feel
strongly that in such difficult, transitional times as these, it is wrong to
multiply or intensify differences by unnecessary explicitations. I think
that such difference as exists between him and me, is not so much one
as to policy (as to what to say or how to say it), but as to one's own
interior attitude (as to the estimate and practice of the driving forces of
religion). If a certain arrangement, a kind of careful fitting together
of externally separate pieces of fact and report, a continuous refusal to
say and to admit, " fat and pat," things as they are, or as they first come
to one, may be a necessity often, and is certainly so sometimes, in one's
external dealings ; yet the fact is, I think, and I for one have to live in
continuous accordance with it, that not in policies and politics, not in

86 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

any external arrangements, however exquisite or wise, but in certain
spiritual forces, experiences and freely willed humiliations, purifications
and elaborations, lie the constituents of religion. Now I am never even
tempted to think that you do not fully see, or that you neglect this. But
I do feel in him the absence of this note of quasi-intuitive, first-hand
experience which, I think, nothing can replace, and which is capable of
leavening mountains of reticence and policy, should this latter be
necessary. It is this, as I have tried to explain, which makes me, I think,
so restive under much of the balancing and up-and-down literature.
That may be a necessity ; but the living waters flow, direct and simple,
simple in their rich variety, in the sabbath moments of the soul, under
all these quasi-political operations.

Mr. Basil Champneys has asked me to find out whether you would
mind his printing your name in the Preface to his Coventry Patmore
book, as that of one of those to whom he owed and acknowledged
gratitude for help in its production. He has already printed an, I think,
tactful and pretty bit of appreciative reference to you, in the book
itself. But, as to the Preface, he says he would, on the one hand, even
selfishly like to do so, to prevent the book seeming to appear without
any support or knowledge of any of our people ; and, on the other
hand, he would readily deprive himself of this advantage, if it were
likely in any degree to lead to embarrassment for you. An answer will
be in good time if given when you look us up, which, I cordially hope,
will be soon.

Mr. Lathbury and that surely touchingly noble Claude Montefiore
I have also been seeing, and have been so glad at noticing that deep
drawing to you which is certainly in both. It was the latter who told
me clearly about your operation ; and I see how entirely I can sympathise
about it with you. One good thing about it is, that you are likely to
be free from any similar trouble for a good while to come.

Since I saw you, or even wrote to you, I have had a fresh proof and
instance as to how living a substance the soul is, maintaining its life
always by a continual re-constitution, by effort, strength, temptation,
growth, and new levels and starting-points, although all this is, no doubt,
the case in very varying degrees and forms amongst various souls. But
the greater the soul, the greater such development. I am feeling it
with and for a much prized, closely watched soul, that is evidently,
please God, moving on to another, a higher level, but with all the
perplexity and danger of the transition : please pray for her. And
I 'am observing it in my working at St. Catherine : it is simply comical
to note the divergence between the facts of her continuous struggle,
effort, and changing, growing achievements and horizons, and her
biographer's emphatic insistence, at every halt in her life, or even of his
narrative, that now at last (he has said so, as absolutely as language

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 87

permits, of even the first moment of her conversion) she is at the very
summit of perfection. I want to try hard to make you read the 180 pp.
of Bergson's Essai. What analysis and heart-knowledge ! He shows,
in an utterly unforgettable way, how all will-affecting feeling and
interior states necessarily change, in proportion as they are profound ;
and how in them each idea tinges and permeates every other idea : it is
only in the dead cold analysis, that one constituent gets juxtaposed
alongside of the other. His distinction between the soul's direct ex-
perience of duration, with its mutually inter-penetrative moments, and
that artificial, bastard compromise between duration within us, and
extension, space outside us, which we call clock-time, with its minutes
each outside of, and simply alongside of the other, has now got bodily
into my head and heart, and into my attempted presentation of
St. Catherine.

But I really must stop.

It would be then beginning with Saturday next, J4th inclusive, that
I would be free for you, till Friday 20th, when I have to go to Downside
for two or three days, to be back, however, at your disposal, indefinitely,
as far as my plans go at present.

Yours very affectionately and gratefully,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : Aug. 19, 1900.

I return you herewith the " Walla- Washee Tribe" paper, with
very many thanks. I have read it all, much of it twice over, with very
great attention, continuous sympathy, and rare intellectual delight.
I have got, to be accurate, to qualify the delight in this way, because
there is of course a profound and pathetic melancholy running through
the paper, which does not become less so to one, because one realises
how inevitable, indeed well-grounded it is, and because one cannot but
ask oneself how long this constraint and trial is to last, and with what
results. As to these latter, I am thinking of the loss to the cause of
truth and religion, and the pain to yourself, if this limitation on your
self-expression and spiritual radiation were long to continue. With
your sensitive nature and delicate health, and immense need of indefinite
activity and self-communication, a long course of silence and repression
would be too painfully trying to yourself, for me to be able to bear to
think of it as probable. I rather love to remember that all may still be
better, much sooner, and in other ways and by other instruments, than
we, in our blindness, can guess or foresee. And you have the quality
which is as real an advantage, in the long run, with, I think, almost all

88 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

others, as it is the one refuge throughout life for oneself. I am thinking,
of course, of your spiritual-mindedness, which is every bit as marked
a feature of yours as breadth of sympathy or freshness of thought. And
already years ago Duchesne said to me, and I have so often found him
right, in the lives of my various friends and in my own : " Work away
in utter sincerity and open-mindedness ; lead as deep and devoted a
spiritual life as you can ; renounce, from the first and every day, every
hope or wish for more than toleration ; and then, with those three
activities and dispositions, trust and wait, with indomitable patience and
humility, to be tolerated and excused. You will find that, if only you
have patience and magnanimity enough to wait so long, and to work so
hard, and to put up with, apparently, such a small result, that result
will not fail you : you will be put up with not more, not one inch more :
but that much, you will achieve.'' And so far I have watched and seen
this come true, in that in-the-long-run, and more-or-less way in which
things do come about, outside of books ; and with times of crisis and
interruption which, again, look romantic only in books, but which I have
had to note as the bread of the strong. . .

To Miss Maude Petre

4 Holford Road : Sept. 26, 1900.

I find it difficult to lay hold of words sufficiently vivid as well as
sober, to describe to you at all adequately the deep and abiding satisfaction,
indeed delight, which your letter has given me. Here in England
I have, just at present, got so few Catholic friends (whom I am seeing
sufficiently often and closely to be able to judge about) who strike me
as growing and opening out mentally ; and yet growth as deepening
and expansion of the whole being, head and heart, are about the one
profound refreshment which one soul can itself experience, and in doing
so, can in some measure hand on to another. And that it should be
my dear Professor Eucken, and his Kampf that are inspiring you so
much, is additionally consoling to me. I have several letters from him
in which he treats of your points (2) and (4) ; I could show you and
read you the special bits, when you come up to us next time. But,
meanwhile, I will try and draw out a little what I understand to be in
his mind on the points you raise.

I. As to " Wesensbildung" You will no doubt yourself have felt
all along how very anxious he is to dispossess one, as far as possible,
of the very general and most tenacious prejudice, that we are born with
" character " and " personality " ; and how hard he strives to make
one feel and apply the opposite conception, that man is born with certain
aptitudes within him, and certain mysterious helps within him and
above him, of slowly, laboriously, painfully, obscurely making for himself

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 89

a character and personality. And to ensure this conception, he fights
shy of all terms or figures which would encourage the conception of an
automatic development, or mere quantitative change, as if, say, man
began by being a true (developed) spiritual cell, with a mysterious capacity
for adding to this first cell, any number of similar cells. No, the real
state of things is much more mysterious and more apparently paradoxical
than that j for though man, of course, begins by finding himself in
physical and animal existence, and though his gradually developing
intelligence, inasmuch as the latter is directed to his simple physical
and generally purely selfish struggle for existence and advancement, can
be conceived as a quantitative reality and growth ; yet man begins with
but the most rudimentary spiritual aptitudes and capacities rudimentary,
that is, in that which the individual himself can apprehend and turn
into acts, habits, and qualities, -into spiritual tissue as it were. From
the first there will be capabilities, inclinations and attractions upwards
and downwards ; but only gradually will the law and necessity of con-
version appear, and with its operation, the whole further process of gain
and conquest of character and personality, will acquire a new depth,
intensity and pathos. And, up to the end, there will be no standing
still, but only the alternative between shrinkage and expansion ; between
the deteriorating ultimate pain of self-seeking and self-contraction, and
the ennobling immediate pangs of self-conquest and self-expansion.
But the difficulty about the whole conception is of course that we are
ready with an ex nihilo nihilfit objection : we cannot imagine how a mere
individual can become a Person ; a mere unit, a moral centre and force ;
an animal, a character. And yet it is clear, I think, that E. is right ;
and that, mysterious though it be, so it is : that with God as supreme
and absolute reality, the moral Person in the world, we have been created
and are helped by Him, in such conditions and according to such laws,
as are conducive to our making ourselves into moral agents of a particular
(our) kind and degree ; and that He, being there to help us, He intends
to help us only to make our own selves, and gives us to begin with our
materials but not the results, and never, at any time, in the materials
practically the results already. You and I will, in a most real sense,
be to-morrow different, fuller or lesser, and truer or falser, Personalities
than we are to-day, and this not simply automatically, but entirely through
the more or less deliberate acts and acceptances of our volitional nature,
and the countless effects and habits of its past volitional history as thus
now again endorsed or revoked, and the grace of God working in and
through these our acts that will take place within the next twenty-four
hours. We shall be passing out of the light, the fact of what we are at
this moment, through the right or wrong contraction, the darkness and
the effort of the right or wrong act, out into the fresh and fuller, or the
more dead and dimmer new light.

90 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

" Wesensbildung" I should then say, is the formation of character,
conceived as a process by which our spiritual substance from being
potentially moral becomes really so ; as a succession of acts by which
we gradually (but always only by ever fresh acts) change our possibilities
into actualities, and again use the resultants as so many fresh possibilities
for fresh acts and achievements. I think myself, the intrinsic diffi-
culties of this (most deep) conception are greatly increased by our (Greek)
habit of conceiving character and the moral being as something of an
already fixed dimension, as a thing and fact, rather than an act and
energy. Yet the soul is not only an energising substance : it puts in
substance by right energising, and only by this means. I take it that we
must remember how all our conceptions can be rendered fully clear
only by means of images derived from and projected into space ; and all
such images are static and quantitative. Whereas when we come to
the natures of the strictly spiritual and moral being and life, we are in
the midst of the dynamic and qualitative, hence of what we can conceive
only either truly and then with a conscious vagueness, or clearly and
then with an unconscious obliteration or falsification of all its true
characteristics. Better far will it be to choose the former alternative.

2. As to a Personal God. You have hit upon a marked peculiarity
of his, the obvious, constant, sensitive antagonism to all Pantheism,
and yet the silence, all but complete, as to Him, and His Personality.
But this hangs well together, I think, with No. i. Deeply convinced
as he is of the existence and constant action, and sustaining power of
God in and upon the soul, and profoundly persuaded as he is that we
cannot ever get to a deeper and more adequate conception of Him than
as an Infinite Personality, which has and combines within itself (in a
manner and degree quite beyond anything but a dim, analogical appre-
hension on our parts) at least all that we have of most truly spiritual
and personal within us : he is yet equally certain that though it is this
God Who made us and sustains us, yet that He made us in order that in
a sense we might make Him, in and for our minds and wills. Not as
though He were not entirely and equally, whether we thus make Him
for ourselves or not ; but because otherwise He is as though He were
not, as far as we ourselves, as our knowledge of Him is concerned.
What God is in Himself we, strictly speaking, do not know. All our
true knowledge of Him is limited to what He is to us and in us. And
this knowledge is necessarily not at the beginning but at the end of our
struggles and endeavours, since it grows with the growth of our own
personality, ever the joint work of ourselves and God. And hence
it is, I think (apart from certain reactions in his life), that E. shrinks
so much from definitions or even from frequent mentions of that
Personality of God, which he is sure motives and decides in fact even
our first instant of existence, but which as a conception of our own (if it is

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 91

to become and remain at all not an idol or a caricature, but is to be as
true and helpful as possible) must, it too, be conquered and again reformed
and reconquered by us, with and through the conquest of our own
Personality. But the very depth of and insistence on his conception of
human Personality of course requires and implies an analogous con-
ception of and conviction as to the Divine Personality, and in his coming
" Philosophy of Religion," I think, he will develop the conception of this
latter more explicitly. And yet, I think he is right in feeling so strongly
that the all-important point is to set all the latent positive powers of the
soul in motion, and to remove all the obstacles, which can help or hinder
the development of deep, true human personality, and together with it
to perceive that this can only be conceived and achieved under the image
and with the actual collaboration of a partnership, or rather of the all-
penetrating help of an infinite spiritual power, which Itself gives what
it makes us ourselves effect within ourselves.

This may help a little to show what I think he means by " Geistiges
Leben" He like Blondel and Laberthonniere is (I think rightly)
deeply un-molinistic in his grace-doctrine. I know he feels the scheme
of God plus man, grace plus nature, predestination plus free-will, all
this putting alongside of each other, as though they were two separate
material bodies, what really are two living energies, completely inter-
penetrating each other, in various forms and degrees, to be utterly
misleading. With St. Bernard he feels that the grace and the free-will
interpenetrate each other throughout, and that the grace is in the free-
will, and the free-will in the grace. Here again, I think, the clarifying
business (of which we are so immensely proud) misleads and impoverishes
us ; and that so little is it true that, in the spiritual world, two realities
cannot (as with two bodies) be in the same place, that, on the contrary, one
spirit or spiritual force or idea has not really penetrated the other, unless
it is in the same point and centre of energising as the other, each as it
were passing right through the other, and not adding to the quantity,
but profoundly modifying the quality of the other. Grace so little inter-
feres with, or even simply adds itself on to, or runs parallel with the
autonomy of the spiritual personality, that it actually constitutes that
personality. Hence you will see, I think, that his " Geistiges Leben "
is not precisely parallel to our ordinary "the soul's life with God,"
because this latter phrase implies so much the static quantitative view
of the soul ; the soul is conceived of as made, and not in the process of
making, and as contracting an alliance with God, not as itself constituted,
qua truly spiritual energising, by that continuous action which is,
throughout, God's work within the soul, and the soul's work in God.

3. Eucken's " Substance " and " existence" and scholastic "Essence "
and " existence." I think all the above will show plainly where the
difference lies between these pairs of terms. In both cases " existence "

92 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

means precisely the same thing, but the whole connotation of Eucken's
" substance " is different and ever so much more rich, vague, and
difficult, than the scholastic "essence." I take it that throughout
Greek philosophy (with but an inchoative difference in Plato) the whole
scheme of thought is based just precisely upon the essence of everything,
the human soul included, being and remaining for ever and aye what
it is, that and no more ; and though Aristotle has grandly true things
about the gradual building up of character, and Plato is splendidly right
in making the quest of truth and of goodness the necessary business of
the whole man, yet there remains the fact, that the whole bent and
trend of their philosophy, of the Greeks in general, is, where at all
consistent and characteristic, towards the static, the intellectual, the
determinist, the perfection in limitation type and pattern. Things here
are real, inasmuch as they endure and resist in their primitive quantities
and qualities 5 things here are known, and adequately known, by the
mtellect, the abstractive process, and by that alone , actions and character
here can be taught, for the will is not a power really distinct from the
reason, but follows the latter automatically, as the shadow follows the
light ; and perfection of all kinds is here strictly limited, is found in
limitation, because all things are made to move, begin and end within
the scheme of reasoning, ever clear and definite, and under the image of
concrete, especially sculptural forms, which are ever beautiful in pro-
portion to their clearly defined proportions and outlines. Now in such
a scheme there is no room for the conception of a slow, indefinite
acquisition of spiritual substance, of a gradual change, through successive
will-acts, in the quality and value of the spiritual entity in man, nor any
tolerance for any real becoming, for any measuring of reality by the
depth and significance of its growings and its changes, for any appre-
hension of perfection as necessarily infinite and eternal (not simply very
great and immortal), above all for any at all adequate conception of
Personality, its passion and its pathos. The Greek (scholastic) essence
is then at the beginning ; Eucken's substance is at the end ; the former
is previous to and independent of Action, the latter is posterior to it and
its fruit ; the former is fixed and stable, the latter is ever growing and
shrinking ; the former is adequately cognisable in its true concept, the
latter is but partially apprehensible, from an analysis of the results of the
experience of the reality itself, gained in and through action ; the former
can be as fully known by the bad as by the good, even though it be but
the latter who utilise and build upon such knowledge, the latter can
be really known only in and .through moral devotedness, since it is
the latter that alone supplies adequate material and sufficient earnest-
ness, and the humility and livingness which will ever begin again and
again the happy, enriching round of action and analysis, love and
light.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 93

4. Religion everything ? or but one thing among other things ?
I consider this as the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae Euckenianae,
and the point on which I think depends the future true and lasting
peace between Faith and Science, and the introduction of the Christian-
ethical, the divine spirit of the child and of the Cross, right into the still
largely pagan intellectual life of the Church. Pray notice first that,
when we say we believe in the Creation, especially when we profess
belief in each single soul's free will, we profess the mysterious belief
that God has somehow alienated a certain amount of His own power,
and given it a relative independence of its own ; that He has, as it were,
set up (relative but still real) obstacles, limits, friction as it were against
Himself. And thus we may well wonder at this mysteriously thin
barrier between our poor finite relativity, and the engulfing infinite
Absolute, a barrier which is absolutely necessary for us, for though God
was 'and could ever be without us, God is no more God for us, if we
cease to be relatively distinct from Him. Let the drop be put in the
ocean, and for the drop there is no more either ocean or drop. And
pray note, that the difference is not by any means simply one of size, of
quantity or relative degree of worth ; it is essentially quite as much one
of quality, of the nature altogether. The similarity can not only never
become identity, but it can never just simply and entirely correspond or
supplement. And note further that this poor little shelter of reeds,
with the Absolute ever burning down upon it ; this poor little paper
boat, on the sea of the Infinite, God took pity upon them, quite apart
from sin and the Fall, God wanted to give their relative independence
a quite absolute worth, He took as it were sides with His own handiwork
against Himself and gave us the rampart of His tender strong humanity,
against the crushing opposition of the pure time- and space-less Eternal
and Absolute of Himself. Here, more than in creation, we again get
the friction ; the non-fit ; the law of one sort here, the law of another
sort there. Yet though God and Christ are not simply things or forces
within and amongst other, simply and absolutely independent things or
forces, yet we cannot, I am persuaded through and through, show our
apprehension of the secret of His law of spiritual life for us all, or
co-operate in building it up, better than in ever remembering, ever
vividly realising, ever practising, ever suffering the (within our world of
relativities) true and real independence which God has chosen to give
Creation, by the very fact of creating it, and still more by incarnating
Himself in its head and centre, man. Never, as truly as creation will
never be absorbed in the Creator, nor man, even the God-man, become
(or become again) simply and purely God, will or can science and art,
morals and politics be without each their own inside, their own true
law of growth and existence other than, in no wise a department or simple
dependency of, religion. The creature is not the Creator, either in

94 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

quantity or quality, it is not a little god ; and yet, though it is indefinitely
lesser, the Creator respects its inferior and different nature. Even so
are science and all the other departments of life not religion, or to be
absorbed in it, or to be anything but as scrupulously reverenced by
religion, as would be a bevy of young women by some strong, mature
man. And this is immensely difficult to the natural man. For the
very minute you have a deep and vivid religion, that very minute you
have, almost irresistibly, the omnipresent conviction that either religion
is everything, since it is admittedly the most important and most
universal of all things ; and doesn't the greater ever include the lesser ;
or, at all events, that, if the other departments require religion, religion
does not require them. At most, it is felt that, since a man cannot be
directly thinking about religion all day, he ought to have some non-
technically religious occupation for a rest and hobby ; or again, that
man has a body, a family, the State, and has duties towards them also ;
or finally, it is even felt that science and art etc. can and do help fill out
and deepen the conceptions of religion, and must be studied and con-
sidered if we would bring religion home to men at any period of the
world's history. I do not think that even Fr. Tyrrell had, till quite
recently, got consciously and consistently beyond this last point. But,
all but always it is felt, with a hardly admitted pang, that, somehow or
other, science does seem to suppose and proclaim another world than that
of the soul's belief and requirements, a purely phenomenal, mechanical,
determinist world, governed throughout by various laws that know
nothing of good or evil, of free-will, of Personality or of a personal,
living God. And hence, most naturally, it is felt further that science
must be cautiously looked at from between blinkers, and that careful
apologies of ever-varying kinds must be constructed to lessen the friction,
to help deny or ignore it, as a constant danger to faith. Now all this
hopeless kind of thing Eucken has made me see clearly to be extra-
ordinarily just exactly wrong and dangerous. His vivid consciousness of
how the character and Personality, the spiritual substance of the soul,
have to be won and conquered through constant effort, renouncement,
conversion and purification j of how selfish and self-centred, how
animal and sensually sentimental is the natural man ; and how his
childishness has ever to be turned into childlikeness, and even his
apparently good aspirations be thwarted and broken, so as to grow in
worth and range : all this would actually make him seek and postulate,
in such a moral training school, just precisely the. friction, the non-fit,
the otherness of science and of religion, of the phenomenal determinism,
and the noumenal libertarianism ; just exactly that scheme of things in
the midst of which we are : in our foreground ourselves, selfish, sensual,
childish individuals, mere units, but with the mysterious capacity (not
more !) for constituting ourselves unselfish, spiritual, manly personalities,

VON Ht)GEL'S LETTERS 95

real unities and organisms ; in the middle distance, the phenomenal
curtain and, as it were, buffer-state, the resisting, but spiritually not
irresistible, medium of the world of physical, mechanical, determinist
fact, law, and science ; in the background, which is really the ground-
work also of all, the noumenal reality, the world of spirits and of the
absolute Spirit, of persons and the absolute Person, the world of liberty,
morality, eternity and love. And though of course in the absolute mind
of God all this must have a certain true fit even as it already is, for God
simply is and has not to become ; it ought to be recognised as an equal
of course, an essential necessity for the constitution of our spiritual
character, that in the human mind it does not ever simply and wholly
fit. Only through this^ friction, admitted, recognised, fully and care-
fully retained, will our soul" be able to rightly and richly move on and
grow and become. And notice, thus the Cross gets planted right into
our intellectual life also ; for is it not a cross, but like all crosses
bringing with it the joy of life, to renounce day and night, to any
adequation between experience and analysis or synthesis, still more to
any merely quantitative difference between the phenomenal and noumenal,
between the determinism of matter and the libertarianism of spirit ?
Not as though a far deeper ultimate, and indeed daily, working unity is
not thus apportioned and felt to be in our very grasp ; but it is a unity
ever reconquered through this very chastisement, a unity always to be
regained through the obscurity and effort of action, and the beautiful
profound asceticism of creaturely thinking and being, which plants the
Cross everywhere, and which through willed and loved friction wins
fruit ever and everywhere.

.Hence if you ask : " Has not religion to do with everything ? " E.
would answer, " Most certainly." If : " Does it not embrace every-
thing ? " he would say, " Yes " and " No " : " Yes " if by religion you
mean here a motive so all-embracing as to make you respect the various
laws immanent to all the various departments of life ; " No " if you mean
a set of laws or notions which can be taken as the simple regulators and
commanders of those other laws. Hence religion will have to come to
see that it cannot attain to its own depth, it cannot become the chief
thing, if it does not continually renounce to aspiring after being every-
thing ; for it cannot become its own fullest self without, not merely
occasioning the love of the Cross in other departments, but also taking
the Cross upon itself. And then all things will become food for such a
faith, and it will become the base, and transfigurer of all things.

I hope I have written things which will be of some help, but the
careful pushing on, slowly, to the end of the Kampf, and the repeated
re-reading of various crucial passages in it, will no doubt do more.

Yours very sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

96 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Perhaps you will kindly, if you care for further discussion, let the
next one be by word of mouth. I cannot find time, alas, to rewrite ;
pray forgive obscurities and difficult handwriting.

P.S. On re-reading I notice that I have not said that my remarks
on (i) and (4) are an amplification of Eucken by means of Bergson and
Blondel respectively : in the first case, as to spatial imaging ; in the
second, as to the philosophy of the Incarnation. Nor have I pointed
out how well E.'s whole position fits in with the very deep and noble
dread of Liberalism on the part of the Church. E. really gets to the
true root, I think, of the mischief. He also makes one see both the
true and the false in Neo-Platonist Mysticism, even as theorised by the
Saints : it is true, inasmuch as it refuses to accept the phenomenal world
either as ultimate, or even as a true likeness and direct help to the real,
spiritual world, and right in insisting on the element of the world flight
and self-renouncement. It is wrong in attempting to eliminate or
evaporate the phenomenal world altogether, and in not allotting to the
most careful, disinterested, objective study of and occupation with its
matter, mechanism, determinism a permanent, irreplaceable place in the
spiritual life in all its stages and this because such science is necessarily
different from religion, and because man wants to be widened by the
thing, if he is to be sufficiently deepened to become a Person, and to
apprehend God under worthily anthropomorphic forms. We are no
Manichees, hence the visible world cannot be evil ; we are no mere
optimists and Deists, hence there must be (quite apart from evil) a
profound discontinuity somewhere. We require then just this otherness
of the two worlds, worlds one behind, one within the other, and not
alongside of each other ; worlds so related, that determinism is everywhere
on the surface and nowhere at bottom or ultimately ; worlds of which
you can hold, phenomenally, the phenomenal one without troubling
about the spiritual one, but of which you cannot securely and deeply
hold the spiritual one, if you will not find a place, in and for the spiritual
life, for the phenomenal, taken with all its stimulating, purifying edges
and othernesses. The day on which the Christian ascetical spirit shall
have woken up to the irreplaceable value for it of the thing, of a pre-
liminary fatalism, on that day will the good man, because he wants to
be better, wish to be not " clever," God knows ; not " learned," God
knows again : but he will have a horror of ignoring these bitter waters,
prepared by God Himself to bring death to his merely natural, petty
anthropomorphism, and will have done for good with all deliberate
hankering after a juxtaposition of Faith and Science.

I must thank you too, most warmly, for The White-Robed
Army}- It is very true and very opportune, and admirably expressed.
I have read it with the most real pleasure and agreement.
1 Article by M. D. P. published in The Month.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 97

To Father Tyrrell

4 Holford Road : Sept. 30, 1900.

If I ought to answer your letters the more quickly the more pleasur
they give me, then your last (of three weeks ago!) ought to have been
answered by return of post ; for it was a keen delight to me. Partly
because of all you feel and say, so truly and deeply, so humbly and yet
trenchantly, of my dear Blondel ; partly because, to push right down
to the root of this, and of my delight, your letter makes me note the still
further development, or at least the still more emphatic expression, of
that hunger for spiritual life and experience as the means, the end, and
the test of all fully human truth and truthfulness, which I have ever so
gratefully loved in you. It is a position which has, I think, about it a
treble wistfulness. Where real and original, it is always, I think, the
result of much and stubborn truth-and-life-seeking, athwart much
isolation, trouble and suffering ; it is too, always and right to the end,
as costing as it is enriching ; and it is, here below, hardly for more than
a part of our life, if God bestows on us the very mixed blessing of a life,
say, much beyond sixty. After all, many men, perhaps most men, never
wake up fully even to the fact of the existence of such a method of
living, and few if any don't fall asleep again, long before the physical life
is over. But during the short, swift years of one's own awakeness, one's
own thirsting to be awake and to keep so, of one's living to keep the
sacred vigil of humbling action and of the wistful open eye, one does
long for the sympathy and stimulation of fellow-watchers. In England,
among Catholics, I feel that at present I have got two such, Miss Maude
Petre and yourself.

As to all you have said about Blondel, I most entirely agree with it.
It, of course, has never seemed to me anything but a defect in him,
that he should be, in places, so immensely difficult to understand, or
that he should (and this would be the cause of that obscurity) have
a language of his own, where the ordinary terms would do. But I feel
as to this in him, as with Robert Browning. Of course Browning would
be a still greater thinker and poet, if he were ever so much clearer and
more easily intelligible. And if a man tells me he does not find Browning
worth all the trouble that he gives ; that he finds all that B. has to say
more accessibly elsewhere, or that what is special to B. is really nothing
much : I can only disagree with him on the question of particular fact,
on the point as to whether or not there is this surplusage of truth and
wisdom in B. over other men to a degree which amply repays all the
additional trouble B. undoubtedly gives. And I think one ought, in
justice, to go still further, and to maintain that though, of course, such
a special language and consequent obscurity is no cause or even necessary
ultimate concomitant of deep originality ; yet that it is an effect and an

H

98 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

all but necessary early concomitant of deep or at least youthful originality.
It is, I think, well that a man should utter in the first place, at least to
himself, his own thoughts in his own language ; though of course,
if he does so, he will perhaps be more impressive to the few who are
anyhow already more or less at the same mental spot, or are moving in
.the same mental direction, but will certainly be a subject for more or
less of astonishment and suspicion, amusement, dislike or patronage,
on the part of such of the crowd and of the politic or political-minded
public as become at all aware of his existence.

I am so glad that Blondel should have now in yourself in England
so delicate and dignified, so distinguished and sober an admirer. For if
the poor man has had his discipline through the ignoring of some, and
again through the attacks and denunciations of others, not his least
Purgatory has come to him from such " popularising," such -vulgarising
in the bad sense of the word as that of Abbe Charles Denis, a quick-
witted Philistine ; or from such reckless transformation as he has been
made to undergo at the hands of Abbe Jules Martin, a clever but quite
self-taught and highly paradoxical young thinker. It will be delightful
if sooner or later, and in some form or other, you can help to get him
known and studied. Certainly his book is a well-nigh inexhaustible
mine of thought and stimulation, and is so delightfully free from any
of that half-educated cleverness, or that paste-and-scissors work which
even the better sort from amongst our people have now, for a century,
been so liable to give us. He stands right in the current of the great
thinkers, and has learnt in their school a perfect, restful seriousness,
and a manly magnanimity. I venture to send you two other things of
his. The one is those additional thirty pages or so, which I told you
were added by B. to his book, when rather more than half the copies
had been printed. Your copy is word for word the same as mine, except
these pages from p. 436 or p. 440 onwards. But these additional pages,
B. prizes very much ; so I shall be glad if you will study them as part
and parcel of the whole. When quite done with, you will please kindly
return them by hand or by registered post ; for it is all but impossible to
get another of those longer copies. The second paper sent is an article
by B. on the Passion Play. He has, though writing his signature on the
copy, not indicated who is to have it ; but I am sure he means me to
choose between yourself and Eucken. And since you are just now
specially full of him, I will send this paper to you. I think you will,
with me, greatly admire certain bursts of truly spiritual eloquence which
now and then seem to break forth in spite of himself, and will note the
profound way in which the whole history of the Passion appears as an
immanental drama still and ever going on throughout the wide,
mysterious world of the souls of men. It is admirable too, I think,
how he manages everywhere to imply and apply the truth that it is the

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 99

Divine which amongst us men grows and energises ; only the purely

j strictly speaking only what was, nothing that still is, nothing
that is, in us, eternal, is there simply fixed and static.

*

Maude Petre has been giving me very great pleasure. She is evidently
getting deeply into, and getting ever so much out of Eucken. How
I wish you too could study him ! I think you would find him perhaps
as rich as, certainly more uniformly lucid than, Blondel. And there is
in E. the same deep seriousness, the same touching sense of God within
us and around, of our mysterious being and responsibility, and of the
sustaining solidarity of all humble, self-denying seeking after truth and
goodness throughout the ages. Hers, too, is certainly a remarkable mind
and soul. I think of her always as the one woman whom I have ever
known (amongst the living at all events) who quite naturally turns to
thinking and philosophy as a necessity and as a help, and who quite
undeniably gets from them an accession of spiritual light and life. . . .
She is absolutely free from all the strain and " non-naturalness," the
touches of pedantry or of affectation, the traces of an attempt to make such
philosophising a (very poor) substitute for the life of faith and love,
either lost or never fully found, or the indications of a mere, often un-
conscious and touching because affection-prompted imitation of others
which I have hitherto, I think always, found in women who have
thought even half as much and half as formally as she does. It is all so
very refreshing, because all so utterly and entirely prompted by her own
inner needs, so completely the fruit and the food of her whole
personality.

To Miss Maude Petre

Pembroke, Boscombe : March 26, 1901.

... I have not been neglecting the interests of your " Love-
Letters " article, and have already had three or four estimates of it, of
which two have respectively much pleased and surprised me. The
pleasing and thoroughly appreciative one is by that rich, much-tried
soul, that has achieved so much, and will, with time and patience,
achieve so much more still, she writes : " How good that review of
Miss Petre's is on the Love-Letters. She has caught the key-note to
my thinking of all that is deepest in life and of all that is best in religion,
summed up in two interchangeable terms (or rather terms which
naturally complete each other), love and suffering." I cannot somehow
help attributing her sane and sensible grip as to the Tightness and spiritual
significance of the human relation and feelings which are the facts from
which you start, in part to the fact of her having been married. Not
but that, of course, the noblest, the thoroughly naturally-supernaturally

(i) Published in The Month.

ioo VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

comfortable and self-expansive type of virginity furnished by some nuns
and some unmarried women living in the world can be and is as whole-
some on these points as the most wholesome married woman can be.
And also I think that Catholicism, taken by her in its true and best
form and spirit, has helped her naturally large mind to take things
massively. In any case, the curious and unsatisfactory other estimate
I have had comes from a very quick-witted and cultivated, evangelisti-
cally brought up old maid of fifty, who has passed through any number
of reactions from this and that, and who, I think, is just exactly wanting
in that wholesome conception of things which the other has got. This
second friend, who wrote first, writes with such an angry vehemence of
feeling, such a flushed face and angry voice showing, somehow, in every
line of her letter, as to make me pause, when first I got it, and make me
go over the whole ground again. But I simply came to the conclusion
that she is wrong and you are right. I think however that she has
come across some very disagreeable Wesleyan mixtures of morbid sex-
emotionalism and high-pitched religious feeling ; and that it is this, still
distressing a very impressionable and reverent mind, that makes her see
harm and unhealthiness in the most trite things. For can any human
relation be more entirely trite, than a high and refined but very deep
love between a man and a woman, engaged to become man and wife ?
And can anyone suggest or require a higher standard and surer safeguard,
than those insisted on by you, of a love founded on and supplemented
by and culminating in the invisible, in a real Faith, beyond and above
all things sensible ? For it is obvious that only in proportion as the love
sinks into the regions of the sensible, that it is even in danger of
unhealthiness. And to require more is but, by excess, to topple into
the very state that kind, self-tormenting correspondent thinks we have
(unintentionally and unconsciously) got here, one, at best, of mental
dram-drinking ; or, at worst, of a plunge down into things of sense.

To the Abbe Marcel Hebert

H6tel Motta, Airolo, Suisse :

Ce 17 juillet 1901.

Bien cher Monsieur 1'Abbe, Vous le savez bien, depuis quel cours
d'annee je suis venu, toujours si fier et plein de gratitude a Dieu
pourvotre influence, d'une elevation et penetration des plus rares, exercee
si doucement et cependant si virilement sur tant dejeunes ames, les
maitres et forgeurs du demain de votre pays et de notre temps, vous voir et
observer a votre ecole. Vous pouvez done deviner s'il ne m'est point
douloureux, et tres douloureux, que de vous savoir si soudainement
arrete dans une carriere si belle, et cela sans que vous me puissiez dire
encore quelle activite y succedera. C'est que vingt-deux ans, tous de

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 101

vie adulte, sont un bel et bon morceau dans lavieme'me des octogenaires.
Et quoique vous, certes, Stes encore en pleine vigueur, et que vous
trouverez, vous creerez' s'il est necessaire, quelque nouvelle occupation
utile et consolante pour vous mSine et vos nombreux amis ; cependant
il est aussi naturel que vous passiez par une, que Dieu veuille, courte
periode de triste detachement de la vieille et chere occupation, sans
avoir encore trouve la nouvelle. Deux jours avant votre billet, 1'Abbe
Loisy m'avait appris la premiere nouvelle de ce triste coup ; et je
m'appretais a vous ecrire quand votre propre billet m'est parvenu.

Trois choses, un peu plus speciales, me viennent en tete a dire sur
ce sujet.

La premiere c'est que je connais bien la brochure dont il s'agit
(1'Abbe Duchesne me 1'ayant prete (mais pour moi seul) a Rome, et
vous mSme plus tard ayant eu la bonte de me la donner). Or de ses
trois points principaux je ne me rappelle point le premier (sur l'glise),
preuve assez claire qu'il me convenait, autant que la plupart de vos
ecrits que j'ai eu 1'honneur de lire. Mais le second je semble me
souvenir que je ne trouvais pas assez d'insistance sur 1'indiscutable
objectivity (et pourtant tres croyable surnaturalite) des apparitions apres
le Calvaire, je me rappelle tres nettement que je ne pouvais accepter
le troisieme point, qui semblait certes vouloir ecarter 1'idee de per-
sonnalite de celle de Dieu. Or sur ce point, je sais bien que mes
convictions sont de 1'autre cote : epurer, elargir, spiritualiser notre
propre caractere et, surtout par la, notre conception de la personnalite
humaine ; eveiller et tenir de plus en plus en eveille, notre sens de
1'inadequat necessaire de toute idee que nous puissions former & Dieu,
1'esprit absolu ; mais enfin Pappliquer avec ces deux conditions con-
tinuelles, comme etant ce que nous connaissons le mieux, et de mieux,
et ce que, a un degre et d'une fa9on pour nous inconcevable, Dieu ne
peut manquer d'etre. Les autres conceptes de loi, tendance etc. me
semblent etre demonstrablement que des abstractions, et comme au
dessous et non au dessus de la personnalite haute et spirituelle. Mais
pardon de tout ceci. Je ne le dis, maintenant, dans notre commune
detresse, que pour tacher de nous faire 1'honneur de la plus pleine
franchise. C'est justement quand on se sent si pres de ses amis et si
frappe en eux, qu'il ne faut point, je crois, se laisser glisser a une position
ou la sympathie s'affaiblit faute d'ouverture sur les quelques differences
entre amis. Et que cela n'empe"che pas du tout mon appreciation
profonde de tout ce que votre influence voulait dire la ; et que je
regrette, tout en comprenant une partie de la desapprobation du Cardinal,
pour une partie des Souvenirs d'Assise, qu'il n'apu se decider depasser autre,
d'une fagon ou de 1'autre, et de vous laisser a votre tache d'amour et de
devouement porteur de tant de fruit. La seconde chose qui me passe
par 1'esprit est la crainte que cette action du Cardinal aura necessairement

102 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

amene avec elle votre sortie de cette belle Association de Pretres de la
fondation de 1' Abbe Therou. Mais je me dis (sans en rien savoir) que
cela se sera fait avec grand regret, avec toute 1'estime et tous les egards
si merites de part et d'autres ; et que cela se sera fait du tout, seulement
parceque la congregation, n'ayant que cette unique ceuvre des externals,
elle ne pouvait guere vous assurer, sous les circonstances, un de ces seuls
emplois dont elle dispose.

Et la troisieme chose que, cher Monsieur, je voudrais tant et tant
me trouver libre (du cote de mes devoirs clairs et strictes) de pouvoir
tacher de vous inviter a venir chez nous ici, vous reposer, pour un bon
temps, dans cet air pur, et ces belles montagnes. Mais je sens et vois
(ceci est tout a fait de confiances) que je ne dois le faire. II n'y a
qu'a peine 2 ans qu'une crise pour elle tres dangereuse, et pour nous
ses parents des plus penibles, crise obscure mais tres evidente, fort aigue,
de caractere religieux a etc enfin surmontee par une de mes cheres filles.
Les choses marchent bien maintenant ; mais cependant elle reste
toujours bien impressionable, et il est de la prudence la plus elementaire
que je lui epargne toute nouvelle complication d' esprit et d' emotion.
Or, votre cas est justement de ceux pour lesquelles elle n'etait, et meme
encore elle n'est point mure. Laissons cette chere ame grandir sans
complications, sans secousses (evitables) ; et 10, 15 ans d'ici elle saura
apprendre, et bien juger, et etre utile en des cas comme le votre. Je
n'ai point aime ne point un peu motiver ma non-invitation ; mais de
le faire m'a ete assez douloureux. Que Dieu est bon ! II sait que nous
avons besoin, chacun, certes pas seulement de la croix, mais enfin de la
croix aussl ; de la croix et de la joie, de la paix et du conflit, de la
sympathie et du delaissement ; enfin d'un peu de tout. Puisse-t-il
bientot maintenant, cher Monsieur et Ami, vous redonner de la joie, du
travail, bien des ames a aider. Vous ne me laisserez point en ignorance,
n'est-ce pas, quand vous arrivez a un nouveau point de votre vie ?
L'adresse anglaise reste toujours la bonne.

Bien cordialement a vous,

FREDERIC DE HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

14 Via Veneto, Rome :

Dec. 18-20, 1901.

It is so long since I managed to write to you, and my life has been
so full of new-old experiences, labour and battle since I left Airolo, that
I hardly know how to begin, or how to tell you one tithe of all I would
like to say. What a grand and entrancing fact it is, to be sure, this
unspeakable richness of the soul's life ; so that, even in the midst of much
sinfulness and of many actual faults, and of much trial and trouble, one

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 103

would not only not, in one's sane and sober moments, have an end of
living and of being, but one would not exchange one's poor life of toil,
of giving (or at least of trying to give) all, and thus gaining something for
the Church and her future and everything for oneself, for all the sleepy,
vegetating existences in the world. And I am having the strange, very
sobering impression that God is deigning somehow to use me, me, in
my measure, along with others who can and do do more, and much
more, towards making, not simply registering, history. And, dear
me, what a costing process that is ! It surely can be badly intoxicating
only in theory, and for those not in the mill, where they would feel
themselves being ground to powder, and would but rarely catch a glimpse
of the use or even meaning of it all ; or again only when it is all over,
and when poor man, so readily oblivious, and inflatable by delusion
and vanity, forgets what it all has cost ; or, as a third case, it may be so
for one of those ready to enter in upon the toil of others, and to speak,
as if there had indeed never been any battle at all, whilst standing upon
the very field on which so much had to be dared and done and suffered,
not many days or hours before. It has been, I think, even more the
inevitable costingness of the struggle, of the having to will fully, and
yet with temper ; of having to strike for all one is worth, and yet to be
cautious ; of having one's poor inner world to keep in order, whilst
fighting a larger and different world outside ; and doing so, necessarily,
in much isolation, with, say, a dozen or so of dearest friends, scattered
over Europe and America, to inspire and help one ; doing it too with
but the certainties of God above and of the inherent Tightness and
necessity of one's cause, and with all the rest blank : it has been all this,
which you know, in somewhat other forms, as well or better than I,
which has absorbed my strength and kept me from writing, more than
my book-work, although that too has been of an absorbing kind. What
I have called four chapters are now typed ; there is no doubt, I think,
that they must be broken up into eight. ... I can't help hoping now,
more strongly than at first, that the result of the whole will be a living
organism, something that will be able to enter into other minds and hearts,
and grow and bring fruit there. Certainly the effect upon myself is
being considerable : I have become a good bit more of a person, please
God, of the right, the spiritual-humble sort, by battling and toiling with
and in and over these great realities and problems.

To the Atte Marcel Htbert

14 Via Veneto, Rome :

Ce 22 janv. 1902.

Bien cher Monsieur 1' Abbe, Si j'ai tarde deux jours a vous repondre,
c est que je voulais tacher de voir clair, et de juger un peu surement,

104 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

en ce qui concerne la matiere dont vous me faites le haut honneur de
m'entretenir. Car je sais tres bien que c'est un vrai honneur que
d'avoir votre confiance ; de savoir que vous tes bien sur que je suis
dispose a faire tout ce qui me serait vraiment possible a vous etre de
service. D'autant plus je me sens presse de ne point faire quelque
faux pas, mme s'il etait genereux, et me ferait du mal sans vous faire
du bien.

C'est que je vois clairement en lisant, relisant, et meditant votre
lettre que, quoique f accepts completement votre point 4, et, je crois,
aussi le i o, j e sens et j e vois que j e n'accepte pas les points 2 et 3. Tout
en sentant, je crois aussi vivement que vous, toute la faiblesse des preuves
de raison froid et statique, que nous offre la " tradition " pour la
personnalite divine ; je ne puis croire que deja dans la recherche et la
decouverte du raisonnable et du parfait dans le monde, il n'opere point
et n'est point sous-entendu, en son premier stade, ce meme sentiment
religieux, qui, bien developpe et epure, nous donne non plus la divinite,
mais Dieu, et non pas un Dieu grossierement anthropomorphe, car nous
ne lui attribuerons ni temps ni espace, mais qui, pour ceci, n'en sera,
je le crois bien fortement avec Lotze, que plus personnel, la refraction
tempo-spatiale sous laquelle nous avons necessairement a nous imager
toute chose 6tant demonstrablement un amoindrissement de la per-
sonnalite.

Mais je ne dis nullement tout ceci pour me procurer 1'avantage
d'un echange d'opinions avec vous, vous qui savez manier le francais
comme je ne saurais jamais. C'est simplement pour vous faire toucher
du doigt ma difficulte par rapport au Pere Lepidi.

Deja, il y a 8 ans je me suis adresse a lui, juste avant qu'il devint
maitre du sacre Palais, mais quand il 6ta.it deja fort influent ici, en les
affaires de mon bien cher Maurice Blondel ; et voici, ces dernieres mois
que j'ai eu des rapports plus etendus avec lui en celles de notre tres cher
Abbe Loisy. En tous ces deux cas il ne voulait pas, je crois, de con-
damnation, tout comme je me dis avec confiance qu'il ne voudra pas
d'une telle pour vous. Mais en tous ces deux cas il etait serieusement
contraire aux idees de ces deux amis, et chaque fois j'ai eu a lutter centre
cette opposition bien nettement marquee. Or, en ces deux cas, non
seulement il s'agissait de deux amis a moi, mais il etait question encore
d'opinions que je comprenais et goutais instinctivement et pleinement,
et qu'il aurait ete bien honteux de ma part, de ne point admettre et
defendre comme les miennes autant que les leurs. Mais si j'allais encore
chez lui, en votre affaire, je lui parlerais, il est bien sur, de et pour un
bien digne homme, une belle intelligence, et une personne que je
m'honore hautement d'avoir pour ami ; je ne pourrais cependant, me
semble-t-il, non pas seulement pas expliquer et defendre ces ides comme
si elles e"taient acceptees par moi, mais je le devrais, me paralt-il, a la

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 105

franchise vis-a-vis de lui et de moi-meme de ne point lui laisser ignorer
que je ne portage point ces opinions. Or en ce cas, non seulement mon
temoignage et mon influence ne pourraient s'etendre au dela de la
question de votre si digne personne, et de 1'injustice et inopportunite
d'une censure quelconque, des points sur lesquels il sera deja, je crois,
eclaire et ferme, mais ils agiraient, pour autant qu'ils avaient un effet
quelconque, contre vous, je veux dire vos idees speciales. Et je ne
voudrais pour rien agir de fa9on a vous faire mal. Je crois aussi que ce
n'est pas lachete ou cet esprit mondain qui m'est, je crois, bien sincere-
ment detestable, si je sens qu'aussi dans 1'interet de mes autres amis je
ne devrais pas laisser croire au P, Lepidi que je partage encore un
troisieme groupe d'idees, a lui suspectes, si ce n'est pas le cas.

Cependant, cher Monsieur 1' Abbe, si tout de meme vous croyez, que
ce serait rendre votre cause un serieux service que j'aille parler en faveur
et de votre personne et de ne point vous molester, vous qui avez fait et
qui ferez encore tant pour 1'Eglise, mais tout de me'me en marquant que
ces opinions ne sont point aussi les miennes, j'irais le voir. Mais pour
le moment je ne puis que croire, a mains que vous le savez prevenu contre
votre personne ou un du groupe de ceux qui poussent le Cardinal a des
mesures, du mains pratiques, contre vous, qu'une lettre adressee sans mon
intervention au Pere Lepidi aurait une meilleure chance, pour ce qui
concerne vos idees.

Je crois que vous faites tres bien d'appeler a la commission sur
les autres points, points oil je me sens du reste a peu pres ou completement
avec vous, et de vous restreindre a la question de Dieu. Je doute fort
si le P. Lepidi serait plus content de moi que de vous, sur ce dernier
point ; mais je crois que ce serait une autre sorte de mecontentement.

J'ai bien note la modification sur la C.P. Elle est evidemment
importante et aurait a trouver place dans la lettre au P. Lepidi.

J'espere de tout mon cceur, bien cher Monsieur 1'Abbe, que vos
tribulations iront maintenant s'amoindrissant, et que bientot elles ne
seront que des souvenirs ; et qu'en tout cas vous aurez la bonte d'inter-
preter amicalement mon attitude.

Recevez, bien cher Monsieur 1'Abbe, 1'expression de mon devoue-
ment tres respectueux et fort cordial.

FR. VON HtJGEL.

To the Jbbe Marcel Hebert

H6td du Sud, Via Lombardia, Rome :

Ce 24 fevr. 1902.

Bien cher Monsieur 1'Abbe, Ce m'a ete une vraie peine que de
n e point avoir pu executer votre commission bien avant cette date-ci.
Mais le Pere Genocchi, qui s'e"tait charge" de me procurer 1'entrevue

io6 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

avec le Cardinal Vives, n'est venu que hier (Dimanche) matin me dire
que sa connaissance du Cardinal etant assez superficielle, il avait du
attendre jusqu'a ce quelque besogne a lui, G., se presentait, pour aller
voir le Cardinal ; mais qu'enfin il venait de le voir tout a 1'heure,
et que son Imminence etait tout pret a me voir n'importe quel soir
entre 7 et 9 heures. Mais moi, de ma part, j'avais perdu patience, tout
en etant sur que ce tres loyal Genocchi ne tardait que par necessite ; et
je m'etais adresse, comme intermediaire, au Pere Esser, qui je savais
connaitre tres bien ce Cardinal Capucin. Et Esser, effectivement,
avait pu me procurer une entrevue, trois jours apres que je lui avais
demande. C'est hier matin, an hres, qu'il m'a conduit chez le
Cardinal. J'ai du me debarrasser de la presence de mon introducteur.
Car si c'est un brave homme, et en matiere Biblique, un esprit large,
c'est aussi un Dominicain et Scolastique, et peut-etre (quoique je n'en
sais rien de positif) un scolastique etroit. Mais je 1'ai fait naturellement,
sans lui laisser savoir de fa9on quelconque, de qui ou de quoi il s'agissait ;
je n'ai dit que ceci seulement, qu'il s'agissait ni de moi-meme ni de
la question Biblique. Alors, seul avec le Cardinal, petit, barbu, aux
yeux et aux cheveux noirs, d'une expression loyale, ouverte, digne et
douce, je lui demandai permission d'etre un peu long avec mes expli-
cations et precisions de ce que je voulais de lui ; et puis je lui racontai
que j'avais parmi le Clerge de Paris, un tres digne et fort respecte ami,
membre d'une congregation enseignante, qui avait ete 22 ans Professeur
et 6 ans Directeur d'une Ecole grande et importante, pour les classes
sociales superieures d Paris. Que cet ecclesiastique avait eu une
influence morale et religieuse desplus grandes et des plus satisfaisantes ;
et que personne, meme actuellement, ne semblait a avoir a se plaindre
de sa doctrine, en tant qu'enseignee, vecue en lui, et developpee chez les
autres. Qu'il avait fait un ecrit anonyme, et en avait donne des exem-
plaires, imprimees mais non publiees, a ses amis intimes, et que mal-
heureusement tous ceux qui en etaient parvenus k prendre connaissance
ne 1'avaient point pris comme il etait k prendre interprete par votre
vie entiere et votre doctrine moyenne et publique. Qu'il est vrai que
moi-meme je n'etais et ne devais point pretendre d'etre d'accord avec
1'analyse et la presentation qui se trouvait dans cet ecrit de ce qu'il y
aurait d'objectif dans notre croyance au Dieu Personnel, et que j'avais
meme commence par craindre que, ceci etant, je ne fisse point a mon
ami un disservice en parlant pour sa personne et sa foi vivante et son
influence et le grand bien que ferait la toleration de son analyse de cette
meme foi, parceque je ne pourrais point ni moi-meme defendre et
accepter comme aussi la mienne cette analyse, ni mme ne point dire
que je ne puis pas le faire, mais que lui-meme avait tout de meme voulu
que je le representasse, et que je dise franchement ou commence ma
divergence de vue. Et que j'etais, au fond, heureux en ce sens de

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 107

metne cette divergence, qu'elle me donnait encore une plus grande
chance et occasion d'affirmer et appuyer mon respect et ma foi en votre
caractere, votre foi et votre influence et de faire cela en compagnie et
comme porte-voix de vos nombreux amis. Que j'avais apporte avec
moi, pour lui lire, s'il me le permettait, une lettre dans laquelle il me
precisait le point de doctrine quant a la Divinite dont il s'agissait. Et que
ce qu'il voudrait specifiquement, si cela etait possible a S.E., ce serait une
opinion sur la soutenabilite, la tolerabilite de sa doctrine, que le Cardinal
verrait, combien il etait ouvert et loyal ; combien put-il continuer
d'accepter et de se soumettre aux decisions dogmatiques de 1'Eglise, et
combien sa situation etait serieuse et douloureuse.

Le Cardinal me repondit alors qu'avant que je lisasse, il devait
m'expliquer comment lui, comme tout Cardinal, etait un juge et ad-
ministrateur, non un philosophe ou the'ologien, c'est a dire qu'il ne lui
etait point libre de donner une opinion, une appreciation scientifique
sur la doctrine ou sa tolerabilite de qui ce soit ; et que lui-meme, etant
un des officiers de 1' Index et surtout du St. Office, il pouvait le faire
encore moins que la majorite des Cardinaux. Mais qu'il comprenait
bien combien il etait desirable de raccommoder la situation avec le
Cardinal Richard (je lui avais raconte jusqu'ou les choses en etaient
allees) ; il avait deja lu de votre cas, en quelques uns de ses traits, dans
tel journal fran9ais ; qu'il etait bien persuade de vos bonnes intentions
et de votre belle et importante influence ; et que si vous Pagreiez, il
serait tout pret a parler de vous et pour vous au Cardinal Richard, lors
de sa venue a Rome en une semaine, et ferait de son mieux pour per-
suader a celui-ci, combien il serait a desirer qu'il puisse s'arranger avec
vous. Que Rome n'aimait point les conclusions radicales, ni a droite,
m a gauche ; et qu'il devrait bien se trouver quelque moyen terme
acceptable aux deux partis. Je cru bon alors de dire, que vous aviez
deja eu cinque longues entrevues avec le Cardinal ; et que c' etait un
homme bien vieux, et dont on ne pouvait guere demander beaucoup de
souplesse ou de modification d'idees. Et encore que vous m'aviez donne
une preuve bien touchante de la delicatesse de votre loyaute, en m'expri-
mant un scrupule : vous me disiez sentir qu'il vous serait impossible de
promettre de ne point plus ecrire sur ces matieres ; ceci etant, serait-il
loyal que de faire des demarches quelconques a Rome ? Et que j'avais
repondu, que, la demarche specifique proposee n'impliquant nullement
que vous seriez gagnable a une telle promesse, je n'y voyais pas ombre
de deloyaute. A ces deux points il me repondit encore toujours par
1 offre de ses services, et qu'il lui etait aussi clair qu'a moi que vos dis-
positions quant a la question d' ecrire ou non, et les tentatives a faire
pour un bon denouement de 1'afFaire, etaient des choses distinctes.

Alors je lui demandai s'il valait mieux que j'attendissea votre reponse
avant que de lui lire votre lettre, ou que je la lui lise tout de suite. II

io8 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

dit que comme en tout cas la communication serait confidentielle et ne
pourrait s'user par lui qu'en le cas que vous acceptiez ses services de
mediateur aupres du Card. R. il ne voyait pas quel inconvenient possible
il pourrait y avoir en la communication de la lettre tout de suite. Je
lui lus done la lettre aux trois points, bien distinctement, et avec emphase,
d'un bout a 1'autre, en prenant soin d'y faire entrer les corrections de
votre C. P. ; mais sans aucun commentaire ou critique a moi. Et je
lui expliquai qu'une lettre posterieure avait exprime un desir que je
substituasse S.E., lui, au Pere Lepidi. II me dit que le P. Lepidi
etait au fond un homme large, et porte a laisser beneficier tout le monde
de tels doutes qu'il pourrait y avoir en faveur de la tolerabilite d'idees de
toute sorte. Que quant a la lettre, il lui paraissait clair que vous vous
aviez forme un systeme et une langue a vous, et que pour bien com-
prendre ce que vous vouliez et ce que vous pensez, il faudrait en avoir
tout un long memoire, un commentaire qui permisse de saisir tout le con-
texte de votre pensee, et d'y avoir comment chaque partie se rattache &
tout le reste. Mais qu'il craindrait que votre pensee ne soit pas aussi
claire et consequente avec elle-meme qu'elle parait a vous-mme, et que
possiblement, la grandeur meme de votre loyaute vous pousse, impergue
par vous-meme, a plus vous differencier de 1' opinion commune, que ne le
demande votre conviction intime.

Je lui promis de vous repeter tout ce qu'il avait bien voulu me
dire ; et il me promit de sa part de me recevoir n'importe quel jour si
et quand j'avais des instructions de votre part pour proceder dans 1'affaire.

Voila, bien cher Monsieur 1'Abbe, ou en est la matiere pour le
moment. Serait-ce bien ou mal, de faire ce que propose le bon Cardinal ?
Je n'y vois pas clair. Vous qui connaissez bien le Cardinal Richard et
la situation a Paris, saurez mieux decider s'il est probable ou possible
que le dit Cardinal vous rehabilite ecclesiastiquement sans exiger de vous
ce que vous etes decide a lui refuser. II me semble clair, cependant,
que le Cardinal Vives, lui du moins, ne se refuserait pas de tenter a
raccommoder vos affaires, meme en sachant d'avance que vous vous
refuseriez a promettre de ne plus ecrire sur ces matieres.

Je suis alle a la Ste. Communion pour 1'intention de cette affaire le
matin, avant 1'audience j et je trouve de la consolation en la conscience
de m'avoir donne autant de peine pour son succes que si ces idees
etaient tout simplement les miennes. Et en effet elles precedent d'un
homme que j'aime et que j'honore beaucoup ; et je voudrais tant que
Dieu benisse et donne plus de penetration etde justesse aux miennes et il
ne le fera pas, si je ne suis tout pret a aider les autres, ceux qui sont bons
et devoues, a gagner et garder la tolerance, meme pour les idees que
je ne partage point.

Votre bien amicalement devoue,

FR. DE HUGEL.

VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS 109

To Miss Maude Petre

Milan : April 29, 1902.

. . . Alas, alas ! I had to leave Rome, before finishing the above ;
and then my days in Genoa with Padre Semeria, and running about
amidst the Libraries there, did not allow me to finish up. I arrived here
late last night, and am off in three days' time, and even here I have much
to do, seeing friends, and reading up for Troeltsch, Eucken and Scheler.
So I must really finish up, and be short over this last bit, which I had
intended to make somewhat full. Perhaps I could write about it
another time, or we can talk it over, when we meet. I will only just
give headings and outlines of the things I have, somehow, " been in " :
these experiences have helped me much towards further self-classifica-
tion, I hope and think, (i) Abbe Marcel Hebert's case : I had to
try and help get his affair with Cardinal Richard right ; a difficult
matter in itself, and somewhat painfully so for me, as (much though I
respect the nobly upright and finely mental and manly character of H.)
I do not think him in the right. To formally get rid of the con-
ception of Personality in the idea of God, to strive to have it admitted
as a mere anthropomorphism, a. pure myth and human subjectivity ; and
to maintain that there is a purely, dryly rational, reasoned proof, not for
this separately existent, " personal " God, but for a certain Divinity,
a Law or tendency towards moral perfection running throughout and
manifesting itself in the totality of things around and within us : all
this seems to me a double error. Neither does the world within us
and around us give us an irresistible, mathematical, automatic proof of
this tendency towards ethical perfection ; nor would the remaining at
this stage of what Eucken would call " Universal Religion " be possible
or normal for religion itself in the long run. For this " Universal
Religion " always moves on and up to " Characteristic Religion," in
which Religiosity really becomes Religion, and where " the Divine "
appears as God. Without the ethical or spiritual sense and requirements,
neither stage will be reached ; with that sense and those requirements,
both will be attained. And to refuse the last would be in reality to
undermine the determining reasons for the first as well. It makes me
so happy to feel that, on this absolutely fundamental point, Fr. Tyrrell
and Eucken, you and Troeltsch, I and Dilthey, James Ward and
Andrew Seth can be and are at one ; and I am sad only at seeing how
entirely the reaction against Scholasticism can remain under the
fascination of the Fragestellung of the latter, boiling all things down to
the most abstract of abstractions, or identifying these with God's rich,
inexhaustible world of beauty, truth and goodness, within us and
without.

no VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

To Professor Percy Gardner (Oxford)

4 Holford Road : Nov. 13, 1902.

It was with a very lively pleasure that, some six weeks ago, I got a
letter from you, encouragingly appreciative of my friend's book, Religion
as a Factor of Life. I cared for it much (and I like to take this oppor-
tunity of telling you so) because I have been following, with such true,
warm interest and general sympathy, your works and endeavours in the
religious field. In saying this, I am thinking of your Exploratio, which,
though I have not yet been able to read it systematically, I find very
stimulating reading ; of your admirably simply and clearly, yet warmly
and reverently thought and felt and expressed Historic View, of which,
again, only the earlier Lectures, but these very systematically, have
been read and considered by me ; and last, and not by any means least,
your most suggestive papers, the Translation of Doctrine, and the two
in the Hibbert Journal, the Basis of Christian Doctrine and (perhaps
most sympathetic and promising to my mind, because most clearly
indicative of further movements of thought) the review of James's
Varieties.

Will you let me tell you what are the three main circumstances and
tendencies in you, that specially cheer and attract me ? And then, the
two, where I cannot follow you ?

The three deep attractions, and it is, of course, on these I love to
dwell, and it is from these I can and do especially learn and derive
strength, are the following.

There is your general, critico-historical, severely cautious and careful
method, and its practice and testing, through years of minutest classical
historical and archaeological labour ; and yet your having required and
effected a great addition and centre the escape into an active and warm
spiritual life, and a harmonisation of these two sides and activities of
your nature, and, as a necessary means to and condition of it, a close and
continuous study of the religious fact and problem. I care for this so
much ; and I too, in my own degree and way, cannot live without both
these sides, nor without a continuous attempting and re-attempting to
find and make their harmony in my life and mind.

Then there is your Scotchness, and your close knowledge of and
deep yet balanced love of German thought and work ; and thus you are
neither a mere cosmopolitan or rootless in England nor even tempted
to pull one up, in the midst of a discussion of fact or of method, with the
question as to whether all this is " English " as even so generally good a
specimen of the High Anglican as my friend Bishop Gore attempts to
do. 1 care so much for this combination also : for my Mother is a
Scotchwoman, my Wife is English ; and my Father and all the foundations

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS in

of my scholarship and knowledge, and a good seven-tenths or more of
my reading, are German.

And lastly, there is a touching, truly noble magnanimity of tone
about all your work ; a rarely continuous consciousness as to the dangers
of ever having finished with one's solutions of these questions, and of all
solipsism. And the latter sensitiveness gives you, even in the midst of
what, occasionally, strikes me as too Protestant a note, a tone of general
justice, and even generosity, towards the Early and the Mediaeval,
indeed even in part towards the modern Roman Church, which is indeed
not lost on me, and for which I beg to congratulate and thank you very
sincerely. I think I can and do reciprocate all this, by so gladly learning
from such noble Radical Protestant scholars, as Professors H. J.
Holtzmann, Troeltsch, Eucken and others, the latter two especially
good personal friends of my own. Indeed Eucken is one of the closest
friends I possess at all.

The two points where I cannot follow, are your somewhat
Harnack-like apparent antagonism to a conception of Christianity as
necessarily a manifold, as an amalgam of thought, feeling and volition ; of
yeast and paste ; of constituents which, because even in the very teaching
of the Founder derived from previous Jewish, Persian etc. sources, and
touched with a new life by Him, were not, on that account, less true or less
legitimate and Christian than those (were there any such ?) which, taken
separately, were altogether new or exclusively His own. But I expect to
find, as I read you more and more, that you have less of this sort of (to
my mind) peeling of an onion to find a kernel, or of seeking of the
originality in this or that separated element, when, as in all life, it resided
and resides in the very combination of various elements. Certainly a
week practically tfte a tete with Harnack's enthusiastic, very competent
and most religious-minded disciple von Dobschiitz, and long discussions
with, and listenings to him, have not diminished my very strong instinct
that, obvious and most respectable as are the motives and advantages of
such a reduction and exclusive selection, the process is largely artificial,
and encourages a certain unattractive, more or less sectarian pietism,
hardly, in its development, more lovely or tolerant than the old systematic,
close orthodoxy.

And my second point, at all events, seems to me one on which workers,
in proportion to their continuous freshness and thoroughness, are already
coming, and will come more and more, to a somewhat other way of
feeling and of thinking. But, here again, I feel it much less in you than
in Harnack ; and indeed your review of James makes me feel that you
are moving still further away from these, as I think more and more, not
very profound " no metaphysics " tendencies. I feel I have some real
right to speak here. For, ten years ago, there is hardly a statement as
to this point, made I will not say by yourself, but even by James, which

H2 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

I would not have echoed, which I did not in good part anticipate, con
amore or furore. But now the close study of such independent and
thoroughly modern philosophical writers as Vaihinger, Volkelt, Eucken,
Wobbermin on the one hand, and of such deeply and finally historical
investigators as H. J. Holtzmann, Johannes Weiss, Ernst Troeltsch on
the other hand, and the living intercourse with living members of each
group, have persuaded me, gradually throughout these last ten years,
that there is a certain demonstrable, utterly irrepressible metaphysical
cognitive element in all, even the most elementary " experience " j that
the ultimate justification in reason of the mathematico-physical sciences
is, in a very true sense, metaphysical ; that man never was and never will
be any more a merely feeling or merely volitive creature than he ever
was an exclusively intellectual one, and that all insistence upon the former
views is but a (largely most natural and in part salutary) reaction against
the latter extreme ; that the preference is to be given not to one function
or element of the living man, but to the sum-total, or rather the under-
lying unique root and centre of these functions and elements, against
any one of them, be they which they will ; and that, correspondingly,
the essence too of all religion, and of Our Lord's teaching and spirit in
particular, is not to be sought in one element, but in the underlying
linkage and interaction of them all. It was strange to note how fierce
v, D. was against the complete critics, i.e. those who feel and see keenly
and clearly how unlike, till we get low down into the whole, we all are,
on every point of our actual or possible faith, to the outlook even of
Jesus Himself ; eschatology, transcendence, hope of the coming moral-
religious-physical-metaphysical new world, these things dominate Him
through and through. . . .

And now may I ask you; if possible, to do something towards
furthering the cause of that which we have in common ? I ventured
yesterday to send you my close friend M. Loisy's two books, the last,
which have just come out. My idea was that L'figlise et I'JivangUe
could not fail to interest you, as it is busy with Professor Harnack from
one end to the other, and as, surely, Loisy's view is richer and both more
radical and more traditional, so at least, I think, it will turn out, than
Harnack's. Yet it is even more evident that few will agree with it.
For most of my people will be glad enough of his general conclusion,
but will fear his premisses ; and the more liberal of your people will like
the premisses, but then, what as to his conclusion ? Still, I do not suppose
that, say, the Hibbert Journal was founded to give a fair hearing to views
in proportion only to their comfortableness, even though to its con-
tributors themselves. It is in that " Journal " that I would so much like to
see a review, if not of this little book, then at least of the other, the
Etudes fivangeliques. My wish was that you would kindly accept
L'fivangile as a little present from me, and would or would not

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 113

notice it, according as you could and cared to do so ; but that as to
the l&tudes ffuangellques you would kindly see that a notice of some
kind appeared in the "Journal." There can be no shadow of doubt that
at all events its four Johannine studies contain matter of genuine
originality and importance. H. J. Holtzmann never fails to draw
attention to these papers, in the Theologische Jahresbericht, as of
serious importance to New Testament workers. And yet I know well
how few men there will be in England with sufficient courage and
independence of mind to accept or even fully tolerate this critical work
of a Roman ecclesiastic.

Please to forgive so long a letter. I care so much for the same
things as you care about. How, in such case, can one break off quickly ?

Yours sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

Hampstead : Dec. 4, 1902.

My very dear Friend, I hardly know exactly how or why, unless

it be in part your, after all not long, silence, I come to have a strong

and abiding, unreasoned and, so far, irrepressible impression that you

are in interior trouble and trial, of a specially strong kind or degree :

but I know that I have this impression. And as, even if (as of course

I hope) I am quite wrong, such a spontaneous solicitude can but spring,

I think, from deep affection and sympathy ; and as its expression, with

so much else for me to plan and do, can but appear as what it is, as a

mark of that attachment and deep appreciation which I bear you : why, I

think it well worth while to put my own work aside for a bit, and, with

tete reposee, to write and tell you of my impression. And I feel all the

more interiorly pressed to do so, because, at Holy Com. yesterday, two

clear pricks of conscience, one a big one, and one a little one, worked

within me and shaped themselves into the resolve of this letter to you.

I felt how that I had urged too much or too rapidly upon you the

Wernle-Troeltsch-Weiss-Loisy contention as to the large element of

Hereafter and Non-Morality in the First Form of Christianity. I am

deeply conscious how that, in my own case, it has been the merciful

condescension of God, which has generally given me my spiritual and

mental food so piece-meal in such manageable and far-between fragments,

which has also, by this, enabled me to keep and improve and add to, I

hope and think, my convictions (and their centre and life-giving power)

as to Him, and Our Lord, and His Church. But, of course, even so,

there have been crises and trials, sometimes acute, and rarely altogether

ii4 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

absent. And I am sure there must be points which, so far, are quite
unknown to me, and which God is most wisely and mercifully keeping
from me, as I am not ripe, and may never be ripe, for them. And it
isn't as if, in your case, I had felt,or were feeling now, that that Interiority
and Presence of the Kingdom were, in itself, untrue, or not the very
centre of religion. So that any at all permanent obscuration of this
Blondel-Miinsterberg-Fichte line would, I feel, be the losing of the
deepest truth, for one which will, somehow, in the long run, but help to
still further deepen and clarify and enrich that other. I also felt that
my last note had been somehow feverish and absolute in tone, and had
said more than I meant, or had said it badly. And so I determined to
make these two little confessions. And also to tell you, not, God
knows, as measuring myself against you, even if you are in darkness,
for it may be my turn next ! that, thank God, without having any
popular, immediately clear answers ready, without indeed being free
from the keen feeling of the difficulties of the position, I do feel that,
at bottom, and in the long run, all is well. I mean, that it will all be
found, in the slow, intermittent, combined and mutually supplementary
and corrective devotednesses and patient light-awaitings of us all, to
have been occasioned by, and to have a place in, that ever deeper appre-
hension of the mystery of life and of love, and of the necessity for their
continuous, painful deepening within our hearts, which Christianity
has indefinitely increased and developed, just because it is life at its most
fruitful and most self-conscious point.

I must beg humble pardon for going on, even as much as this, since,
I may be wrong, and there may be no occasion ; and if there is occasion,
this would be so far too little, in quality at all events ! I need not say,
I hope, that, if and when you like, I would listen, so affectionately and
respectfully, to anything you might have to say, and I could promise,
I think, ever to learn before answering, and not necessarily to say anything
at all.

Possibly, too, I am right as to the existence of trouble, but wrong as
to its cause, and that it has to do with the Order. But I fancy not, for
it was surely a capital thing, their acceptance of the two " Mysteries "
papers ; and now their taking that manly Fr. Lucas's capital notice
is a similar, most hopeful sign. I do feel that, if and when you can, it
will be so very good for you to write there again. There you have
necessarily so much, if not more at least wider influence, at least
amongst the people who most require training in those directions than
pseudonymous writing usually secures.

You are doing that, and will do that, more and more ! Pray for
me, my dear good Friend. If you are in darkness, God will hear such
prayer for light for us both. And meanwhile we will attend to our

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 115

healths, and get plenty of air and quiet, and bright, light books too,
Barrie's The Little White Bird is delightful.

Your most affectionate old Friend,

FR. v. HUGEL.

If you do write for the Month, might not a couple or more of papers
on Nicolas of Cues be interesting and acceptable ? I do not feel as if
an expansion or modification of " R." would do there.

And now I will sink back into my own work, but with my poor
heart prayerfully and affectionately full of you my intensely alive,
immensely impulsive and hence astonishingly, most meritoriously and
fruitfully balanced Friend !

I was ashamed of the style of my last ; I trust this is a little better !

To Professor Percy Gardner

4 Holford Road : March 14, 1903.

I find that several matters have been accumulating, one on top
of the other, in such wise that, though I am personally really over-
whelmed with work of all sorts, and though I know you to be at least as
busy yourself, I cannot well put off writing to you, about three things,
I think it is.

For one thing I was, at the time, a bit sorry, that you so little took
to Archbishop Mignot's and Miss Petre's papers. But then I soon
consoled myself with the reflection that, as to the latter, I very possibly
read much into and between her lines, which I had gathered from my
long personal knowledge of her truly fine, large mind and soul. And
as to the former, I noted, more than I had done before (and I owe you
thanks for being the occasion of it), that his Discourse has certain
absolute-sounding passages, as if he would have every (at least every
Catholic) worker assume and save or spare certain points and positions,
instead of following simply the immanental necessities and probabilities
of his subject-matter and of scientific treatment. But seeing that he
(even in this very paper) flatly and repeatedly denies that we have as
yet any Theology, any system of such, which has any right or power to
tie us down, and that we have, indeed, to humbly labour at gradually
helping to build one up, of an inductive and scientific kind ; that he,
here again, gives illustrations to show how even the most immutable-
looking single points which have been, in a certain true sense, fixed for
us, are subject to the most far-reaching modification of interpretation ;
that such a man as M. Loisy has, at this moment as much as ever, no
warmer, more notorious or active friend and backer than Mignot (the
latter's quite recent letters to me,and indeed his acts, show this with entire

n6 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

plainness) ; and finally that a man of such unsuspected independence of
mind and of philosophically large but yet distinct Protestantism as
Professor Eucken should have written at such length and with such
warm appreciation of this very address : all this, combined with the
active antagonism which M. encounters from all the old scholastic
people, reassures me as to my estimate of Mignot's intentions and drift
being not mistaken or too high.

I was sorry too that I had not made it clear how that I did not
have any definite ideas whatsoever as to advantage being likely to accrue
from discussions in the Hibbert Journal. With you, I am far from
certain that they will do good. I only thought that if some of my
people were to be asked to write there, specifically in defence of our
general positions, they had better do so backed by our Church authorities
here. But you make up for this, even at the moment, by liking my
good Ehrhard's book ; there are parts of it especially which I think
about as good and balanced as they could be made. 'Then, and this is
more immediately business, I want to say, in connection with M. Loisy,
that though, at the time when you mentioned it, I considered that one
could rightly deny that there had been any definite indications of special
Roman disfavour, or of a coming Roman condemnation : I now think
that, since then, the situation has so far changed, that it is quite possible
or even probable that Rome will do something, but not much, I think.
My impression is that the maximum at all likely would be the placing
on the Index of the little book so many of us so cordially admire. I
should regret this ; but even so, if (as I think) there will in no case be
any condemnation of definite propositions, or such-like, things would
have still moved on a good bit, and in the true and eventually triumphant
direction. I did not very much like the article on L. in the current
Contemporary : it had too large an amount of journalistic shout : the
best praise is ever " deeper than the lips," and is limited, owing to sheer
respect. I am much looking forward to your notice ; I think that
will give me what I want.

And third and last, and this is quite definite business, I would so
much like to be allowed the pleasure and (as I feel it) honour of proposing
you as a member of our " Synthetic Society " ; if, of course, you were
willing and cared to join us. If I may say so (it always feels somewhat
indecent somehow not to criticise but to praise any fellow mortal
to his face), you are so thorough and truthful, and so deeply religious and
reverently free, that I should dearly like to see you at our table, and to
have your support and your checking too ; we want, I am sure I want,
both. We have our next meeting next Thursday, 1 9th March, and if
it was possible for you to have made up your mind by then, I could and
would propose you on that occasion, and you would, I think, be able to
join us at our April meeting, and certainly at the May gathering. Our

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 117

present Chairman is Sir Alfred Lyall (by the bye, I lent him your
Historical View with your handsome reference to him : he had
never seen it, and he read it with much interest), and Wilfrid Ward is
the Secretary. I think I had better explain that the original intention
of this Society was. not to be a continuation of the defunct "Meta-
physical " : for we were to be all Theists of some kind, and were not
to debate points not held by us in common, but simply on the best
reasons and modes of presentation of the convictions we already had in
common. And this it was that attracted me, as a sober and hopeful
programme. And though I am bound to admit that (it was largely,
I think, Arthur Balfour's doing) wholesale elections (just at first) intro-
duced a certain number of men who had hardly a right to belong to us
(compatibly with the objects of our union) : yet, even so, we have done
some good, I think. For Sir Oliver Lodge though he has still got
that curious more or less credulous hankering after finding God and
the soul at the end of a telescope or microscope, which the exclusively
physically trained mind invariably betrays, as soon as ever it begins to
admit its want of the spiritual we have done him good : he is no more
the cheerfully " complete " agnostic that he was : there is something most
wistful and attractive about him now. I imagine that you may feel
us too predominantly philosophical and first-principles a crew, and too
little given to the historical occasions and concretions of it all, for you
to be in your place amongst us ; or again that you simply have not the
time or strength for it. Still, we so badly want just your sort of mind, I
think (as Dr. Bigg, Dr. Bryce, Prof. Edward Dicey, Sir Richard Jebb
are historical-minded also) ; and once a month during the months from
October to July is so moderate a maximum attendance, that you may
decide against both objections. . . .

Yours with cordial sympathy very truly,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Professor Percy Gardner

4 Holford Road : April 25, 1903.

Pray forgive my long delay in thanking you for your two interesting
gifts. The fact is that I wanted, before even barely acknowledging them,
not only to carefully read both the book and the article, but also (seeing
your very emphatic declaration as to M. Loisy's insufficient fairness to
Harnack) to refresh my impression of the latter. And I am so busy
with my own work, that such readings can only be carried on during
occasional afternoon hours snatched from other occupations.

But now I have very carefully read every word of your most
attractive and stimulating Oxford at the Cross-Roads : indeed many
passages -I have read three and four times ! The first chapter struck

n8 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

me as quite particularly fresh, and reminded me of the first chapter
of Paulsen's Introduction to that collective book Die Deutschen
Universitdten ; and Paulsen writes so vividly, that such a reminiscence
implies high qualities in that chapter of yours. I was particularly
delighted with what you say about sports, and about the man who knows
and his power in our day. In your second chapter I was profoundly
refreshed by your denunciation of the merely rhetorical spirit ; and
in your third, by your delightfully first hand and deeply experimental
account of the indirect, chiefly methodological value, and the uniquely
bracing effect upon the worker, of all research and direct contact with
fact. But it is, of course, your fourth and fifth chapters which interested
and satisfied me most. And in the fourth, it was the two pages 64, 65,
with their admirable rejection of the obvious forms of efficiency, and
your startlingly, sadly true warning as to the infallible deepening of
racial hatreds involved in any " modern " scheme of education. You
can hardly imagine how keenly I sympathise here. In the very
remarkable and most stimulating fifth chapter, it was pages 78 to 81,
with their fine plea for the extension of the meaning of " science,"
in English, for abroad there is less need of any such plea ; your happy
quotations from Huxley and Robertson ; the recognition that science
cannot directly furnish us with purpose and an ideal for our lives ; and
especially the large outlook and wisdom of pages 96 to 102, with their
references to religious psychology and its conservative tendencies ; to
the utility and function of religious doctrine ; and to the difference
between historic facts and their interpretation. Chapter 6 still had
much to interest me. Chapters 7 and 8 are necessarily of more strictly
local and temporary interest ; and yet there too I could indicate many
a passage which gave me very much true pleasure. Thank you, then,
very much indeed. I should find it hard to have to find any clear or
considerable grounds for disagreement or adverse criticism. I do feel
a certain degree of uncertainty, in your Human Science chapter, whether
you quite grasp what seems to me the indestructibleness and necessity
of metaphysics of a most real, though of course not of an anti- or even
pre-experimental, or of an at all fantastic or simply traditional kind.
Still, your paper on James' Varieties satisfied me on this point also.

As to the kind and long notice of M. Loisy's book, I have read it
three times, and find it full of interesting points. Thank you very
much for it. M. L. has now written to me, begging me, on the first
occasion, to cordially thank you for it in his name also. He says that he
must confess to a certain disappointment at it, not with respect to its
tone, for indeed he feels that to be most kind and courteous ; but because
he feels that, somehow, you have not fully grasped the precise object and
drift of the book. I too feel this, to a certain extent : and hardly, I
should say, as a matter of course and because of my Popery. For, with

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 119

yourself, I recognise a certain amount of special pleading in some parts
of his third and fifth chapters. But I think (with Harnack's Wesen
now quite fresh in my mind) that, although not a few single passages
could be quoted from H. to show that " he does not start from a single
principle," yet that he does, pretty well continuously, judge the belief in
the Divine Fatherhood and that in the pure interiorness of the Kingdom
of Heaven, as the two interdependent abiding elements and measures
of true religion. Indeed one feels the noble effort that it costs him, to
think of anything external, organisation or anything else, as truly
helping, as in any sense necessary, to the production, the increase of
these convictions and emotions. But indeed you yourself also write,
not only as though no particular kinds of externals were necessary, but
as though even externals in general, some kind of externality, were not
necessary, except as results and embodiments of the internal conviction.
Yet surely they are necessary, at least in a general way, also as occasions,
stimulants, etc., for the growth of these convictions. And, to confess
to a conviction which can easily look like bigotry, but which I am
convinced is but simple justice, and which alone (I think) lifts, say, my
own adhesion to Rome on to a plane above simple tradition (I have
uncommonly little of it in me, as all my friends would tell you), or
irritating special pleading, or unintelligible subtleties : I would for
myself (and I think M. Loisy would do so too) answer such appeals as that
of your penultimate paragraph, by some such words as follow. You
there seem to say to us, in effect : " Why cling to the idea that the Roman
form of Christianity but one among many has any pre-eminence,
any right to hold itself as the one complete or as the completest instru-
ment and expression of Christianity ? How can you gentlemen in
particular do so, you to whom Papacy, Episcopacy, Presbytery etc. are
largely but of very mediately divine or Christian origin ; who see them
to have grown up when and where they were wanted, and to be now
competed with by different combinations or forms of themselves or by
other institutions altogether competitors to all appearance as fitted to
their special age and place, and as truly productive of Christian life ? "
Well, I for one would answer : " I willingly accept the appeal to life
and results. And, accepting it, I see two sets of facts, over against each
other ; and they are both true, and the same principle which makes me
admit the one set, also forces me to proclaim the other. I admit that,
since the saddening division of Western Christendom, it has been your
people, not mine, who have all but monopolised political freedom, and
who in great part occasioned, and then far more readily practised, and
believed in, the essential doctrine, so largely lost during the Middle Ages,
as to the unjustifiableness of force in matters of conscience. And again,
I admit that it has been your people, far more than mine, who from, say,
17 onwards have carried on that reverently free research, and have

120 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

improved and increased those methods of enquiry, which the best of the
Renaissance scholars, and indeed many seventeenth-century Catholic
workers, so largely founded. And these two complexes of human
activity civil freedom and untrammelled research humanity must
and will have them. Religion itself requires them, for its own complete
and normal development. And Protestantism has deserved its success,
inasmuch as it has really supplied them ; whilst Catholicism cannot but
shrink and dwindle, inasmuch as it cannot find room and love for them.
But then I see a double phenomenon, of another sort, on the other side.
I see, it is true, and I rejoice in the sight, that countless souls have been
and are deeply, spiritually Christian, in every form of Protestantism.
Yet I cannot but note that Catholicism, at its best, still somehow
produces saints of a depth of other-worldliness, of a delicate appealing
heroism, and of a massiveness of spiritual wisdom, greater than I can
find elsewhere. And indeed I note that men so much outside our
system as William James are generally ready enough to admit this.
And to feel this is, I think, no more fantastic or exclusive, than to feel
the (of course) indefinitely greater difference that you as well as I see be-
tween the spiritual size and standard of one-fifth of the human race, and
those of the non-Christian four-fifths, dear though these the latter are no
doubt to God, and much of spiritual light and love though they certainly
receive and manifest. And then I see, too, that this greater size of the
biggest of my people cannot in reason be taken as appearing in spite of
all that, say, Harnack loves so little. It floes show, I think, that there
is a connection between the deepest manifestations of the Christian spirit
and character, and things which he would at best but tolerate and excuse,
and treat as disconnected with what they, as a matter of fact, have
helped to bring forth. I say this, whilst quite admitting that some
discriminating principle is badly wanted in Loisy!s scheme, some kind
of test for distinguishing between truly superstitious or otherwise
oppressive growths and genuine spiritual developments. But I was so
much struck with the keen insight of our Bishop Spalding of Peoria,
U.S.A. (whose family have been American for 200 years), when, in Rome
three years ago, he developed before me with astonishing eloquence the
contention, that history had conclusively manifested and established two
things : the impossibility, for any society and state that would live and
grow, of the Spanish, physical force, sheer authority, and blind obedience
type of Catholicism j and the incapacity of pure Protestantism, e.g. the
Free Churches of America, to produce the very deepest and largest
saints. Hence the future seemed to him and to myself to demand
that the legitimate aspirations and the undoubted benefits of Protest-
antism should be realised and should remain, and that corresponding
changes should occur from within, in the attitude and practice of
Catholicism ; but not that it should simply go, or that the great con-

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 121

ception of a collaboration of all the forces in man and of all the various
types of spirituality and of social position and influence of an objective
inter-racial deposit and training of and in religion should simply give
place to its rival.

I venture to send you two (also, alas, somewhat old) papers of mine.
The French one is a translation by myself of a paper of mine : but all
the copies of the English original have been given away. The
English one will also, I hope, please you, for it is full of respect and
affection for a strongly Protestant friend of mine, from whom I grate-
fully learnt much.

With renewed warm thanks,

Yours sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To the Abbe Albert Houtin.

4 Holford Road : Ce 27 mai 1903.

Cher Monsieur, Quoique je n'ai point 1'honneur de vous con-
naitre personnellement, je me permets de vous adresser ainsi, et de vous
ecrire une lettre de remerciments bien sinceres. Car vous etes ami de
mon tres cher ami Monsieur Loisy; vous avez bien voulu dire du
bien de mes travaux dans votre livre si remarquable " La Question
Biblique " ; enfin voici que, dejk il y a quelque peu de temps vous
m'avez fait parvenir, par 1'entremise du savant de Bellevue, votre fort
interessant opuscule Mes Difficultes avec mon v$que. J'ai ete telle-
ment pris par mes propres travaux, que je n'ai pu bien lire ces pages
si pleines qu'il y a deux, trois jours ; et seulement cet apres-midi je
trouve une demi-heure, pour vous en dire mes impressions.

II est bien sur que la encore vous avez produit un ecrit, des plus
distingues et par sa forme claire, agreable, noble, d'une simplicite
classique ; et par son fond d'un interSt, d'une actualite palpitants et
qui restera. Et cela fourmille de points pretant & reflexion. Ce que
vous y dites de 1'antiquite et generalite de la critique Catholique de la
" tradition " apostolique des figlises de Gaule ; de la necessite de
1'Imprimatur ; de 1'affaire de Votre MS. perdu ; des approbations de
Sulpiciens (Touzard ? Cersoy ? Tixeront ?) ; des livres a la Gibbons
et Girodon qui vous aiderent avant 1'ordination ; des condamnations,
sans lecture prealable ; tout cela est interessant et fort bien raconte.
Et puis, j'ai ete, fort naturellement, beaucoup touche de ce que vous
racontez a propos de Monsieur votre Frere ; une rude, mais aussi une
douce, experience et pour lui et pour vous ! Et cependant mon
mteret et mes reflexions se sont portes sur deux groupes de passages,
dans un cas, avec une pleine union d' esprit ; dans 1'autre, avec une
certaine persistance d' incertitudes de jugement, k travers toute ma

122 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

sympathie et toute ma comprehension de vos difficultes. Le premier
groupe (pp. 1720 ; 5860 ; 56, 61) concerne la critique, votre eveil
douloureux a son egard, et les theses generates que vous le croyez avoir
etablies. La je ne vois pas comment quiconque qui a une connaissance
approfondi de ces questions pourrait ne point etre en un accord sub-
stantiel avec vous ; comment il ne pourrait point ressentir, avec vous,
les dures epreuves par lesquelles vous passez ; et, surtout, comment il
pourrait ne point admirer la faon belle et grande dont Dieu et votre
ame ont fait que, malgre tout, vous ayiez garde votre foi. Que cela
est bon et doux et profondement edifiant ! Et ici encore, ici surtout,
votre forme est digne de votre fond : le tout ensemble frappe et gagne
1' intelligence et Pame. Et, un point qui m'attire profondement
1'esprit, le point de vue, la tendance du tout, sont pleinement, bellement
Catholiques, c'est-a-dire sociaux, collectifs, institutionnels, developpe-
mentaux. Le second groupe (pp. 37, 50 et ailleurs) concerne votre
nominations a cette cure dans le Diocese d' Angers ; le fort desir de
Mgr. Rumeaux que vous Pacceptiez ; et votre crainte, apparemment
invincible, de vous y engager. Or ici je crois tres bien comprendre
combien vous avez du souffrir a Angers ; combien il doit avoir semble
quasi-impossible de vous etablir, de vous maintenir dans une Cure de
campagne, en depit d'hostilites au dehors et d'isolement au dedans :
et combien tout cela aura etc aggrave par, me dis-je, un temperament
peut-etre un peu a la Cardinal Newman, qui (je 1'ai connu personnelle-
ment) a ete tres peu compris, fort persecute, a etc quasi- touj ours dans
le vrai et d'un esprit une bonne douzaine de fois plus profond et large
que celui de ses adversaires : mais qui, aussi, avait un temperament
tres impressionnable, facilement preoccupe des piqures qu'a la fin mme
les mouches semblaient lui donner : un temperament auquel il a plus ou
moins succombe. Et, de 1'autre cote, j'ai pu observer tel autre de
mes amis qui est parvenu, par une patience et un courage heroi'ques,
a enfin desarmer 1'opposition, non par aucune concession anti-scienti fique,
mais par simple devouement et souplesse charitables, et par une
patiente attente de cette confiance, mme des etroits, qui lui est enfin
venue. Et cela, tout cela, me fait incertain, m'induit a me demander si,
apres tout, il n'aurait point mieux valu accepter cette cure, et y, peu a
peu, apprivoiser, gagner ce monde. Car enfin ce monde la aussi, il est
gagnable, par la pure bonte, a la longue, plus ou moins. Et, malgre
vos souffrances si reelles : votre recit, si sincere, lui-mSme laisse, je
crois, 1'impression tres forte que PEVeque, apres tout, comptait tres
sincerement vous respecter et honorer en vous confiant cette cure.
Et, en effet, ce serait une fa9on par trop complexe de vous chicaner en
vous honorant. Et ce qui, meme tout a fait en dehors de votre propre
avenir, me retient en ce genre de reflexion c'est la perception, tres nette,
tres vive, apres toutes sortes d' experiences tristes a travers 30 ans (j'ai,

VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS 123

helas, plus de 50 ans, et les cheveux deja gris !), de ce que nous avons a
vivre et a creer, non une chose simple : la science sincere ; mais une
chose complexe, couteuse mais consolante, comme est toute vie reelle et
vecue, la science sincere en et avec une religion profonde et historique,
en et avec un Catholicisme vivant parceque toujours renouvele et re-
experimente, or c'est tout juste en cette combinaison que reside la
difficulte : lui dedier sa vie, c'est ce qu'il y a, je crois, de plus glorieuse-
ment devoue et douloureusement fecond au monde car j e ne me fais
point d'illusion sur le point : s'il semble bien dure que 1'on ne puisse
vivre et mourir en savant sincere (savant, bien entendu, en les matieres
historico-philosophico-religieuses) en Pfiglise, sans doubler cette
activite par un devouement d'homme profondement interieur ; s'il
parait que 1'on ait le droit de dire "halte" a Dieu et aux hommes, et
d'insister qu'ils n'ont pas le droit d'exiger de nous plus que la solidite et
perseverance d'un honnete homme moyen : tout cela est faux, tout
cela croule et craque, de fait, dans les circonstances qui ont etc faites,
lentement, depuis plusieurs siecles, pour le savant Catholique d'au-
jourd'hui. Et pour ma pauvre part, vu la profonde realite de la vie
interieure, et que la, au fond, se trouve la vraie grandeur et joie" de
I'homme, j'ai fini en benissant Dieu (dans les moments de respiration
laisses libre par les crises et les chocs) de cette necessite, en apparence si
brutale, de me faire pardonner mes idees par ma vie et mes aspirations
spirituelles, et m'adoucir et m'apprivoiser moi-meme a tout ceci, comme
instrument de mon assouplissement fortifiant.

Je crois, cher Monsieur, que vous comprendrez bien, que tout ceci
est dit, sans aucune demangeaison de sermonner mon Cure, et bien
certes, sans aucune critique, meme indirecte, de votre attitude ou ton.
Au contraire, j 'admire beaucoup votre dignite et moderation fort
preponderantes et presentes au fond partout. Bien certainement cela
me paraitrait bien suffisant pour toute la vie, tout comme cela est bon
et virile en soi. Ce sont seulement les circonstances tout a fait excep-
tionnellement difficiles que Dieu a bien voulu permettre d'entourer,
d'assieger votre esprit actif, sincere, haut, clair et delicat ; c'est seulement
Pimmense importance, valeur, au fond necessite, pour la religion et
1'eglise, de la perseverance et de 1'activite d'une telle vie pour cette
religion et cette glise elles-memes : ce n'est que la perception aigue de
cette difficulte et de cette importance, qui me fait retomber, moi-meme
avec vous, sur les ressorts et les bases les plus profonds de la vie et du
devouement. Et j'ai eu a maintes reprises, une experience si pleine de
la maniere dont un devouement profond et continu dans tel de mes amis,
a fini par desarmer les oppositions, en apparence les plus inconquerables,
le laissant libre, non certes a satisfaire tous ses desirs, meme honnetes et
raisonnables, mais a etre lui-meme, et a faire un bien que tout simple-
went un autre ne pourrait faire a sa place : que je prie Dieu, avec une

124 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

instance tres confiante, tres consolante et meme consolee, d'affermir, de
vous approfondir, toujours de plus en plus en cet esprit de noble patience
et interiorite triomphantes et creatrices, et de vous faire bientot en
experimenter les fruits en toute direction. Bien naturellement je pense,
en fort bonne partie, a ce que quelque combinaison, quelque arrangement,
d'une sorte ou de 1'autre, advienne, et a pas trop grand distance de temps,
et modifiasse la tension si douloureuse de votre position ecclesiastique ;
que Mgr. R. vous fasse, ou soit dispose a vous faire une proposition telle,
que vous, de votre cote, peut-etre avec une modification possible de
quelque detail Je votre attitude actuelle, pourriez accepter ; ou bien
que Rome ou quelqu'autre autorite ecclesiastique intervienne a un degre
acceptable en votre faveur. Que Dieu le donne, et que vous en meritiez
de plus en plus : vous le meritiez deja, a un si noble degre !

Le Revd. M. Lilley, de Paddington, m'a parle de la bien bonne
lettre qu'il a re9ue de votre part : quelle intelligence belle et sympathique!
Mon intime ami, le Revd. Pere George Tyrrell, actuellement a 31, Farm
Street, London, W., serait fort content d'avoir un exemplaire de vos
Mes Difficulty : M. Loisy vous dirait, comme moi, combien cet
homme excellent, quoique membre (plus ou moins captif) dela compagnie
de Jesus, meritecetteconfiance. Et Dom E. C. Butler, O.S.B., 5, Hobson
Street, Cambridge, Angleterre, serait (lui aussi ecrivain et critique
historique distingue et fort ouvert d' esprit) fort content d'en avoir un,
lui aussi.

Avec mes remerciments, mon admiration, et ma sympathie tres
sincere, je reste, cher Monsieur 1'Abbe.

To Father Tyrrell

May 30, 1903.

. . . Your letter has given me far more pleasure than I can
adequately describe or at all requite, in the midst of the final odds and
ends, before decamping, till Thursday, to Cambridge. For you have
evidently dwelt upon the one idea and conviction in my paper, which
I myself feel to be of certain and abiding importance. I have had for
years, increasingly, a double sense : of the large, spacious, range of our
ethical etc. capacities, and of the necessity and value of an ideal and
indefinite exercise for them ; and of all this not being God, not one bit,
not one bit. Until a man feels this, sees this, till it pierces his soul :
Eucken has this constant sense, Troeltsch has it ; Seeley had it not, nor
(I think) Comte : he has not, I think, waked up to the specifically
religious consciousness, or, at least, to the central point of its analysis.
God is emphatically not simply our Highest Selves ; heaven for us will
not be a simple adequation or a simple identification (even in kind, apart

VON HU GEL'S LETTERS 125

from all degree) of our nature with God's ; religion is not a simple or
full intercourse between equals (in kind any more than in degree), where
the movement from God to man can be understood by tracing it back-
wards, in the movement from man to God. All Universal Exhibition,
Prince Albert-and-dear-Bunsen " religion " ; all Mechanics' Insti-
tutes or British Empire or other human-ideals prolonged, purified,
enlarged indefinitely, can, at best, but help us to get nearer to a sense
of that difference, in and through our own enlargement. I am hot,
weary, stupid : I am longing for my holiday, and must think no more.

To Father Tyrrell

April 30, 1904.

How nice and helpful it would be, if, instead of poor pen-and-ink
scribblings, cold and skeleton things at the best of times, >we could
meet and talk things over at our leisure. My budget of facts and
opinions as to all that interests us seems to me to have swollen to a
size fit to fill a book : and yet all of it could with ease be discussed,
if we could be meeting regularly for a while. It is true that I look
forward to coming to you to Richmond for, say, three weeks : but that
cannot be before August, and that is a long way off, and events move
quickly. I have anyhow to be daily in these delightful Parks for a good
two hours in the afternoon : and what a good thing if you could be
for a while, say a month, at Farm Street, and we could meet, every
day, half-way from each other's doors somewhere in the open, for about
that length of time ! . . . My reading is just now Meredith's Egoist ;
notwithstanding its self-consciousness, and frequently painful involution
and obscurity, that is, surely, a great book, or at least a book with
simply unforgettable scenes in it.

To Mrs. Henry Drew

13 Vicarage Gate, Kensington, W :

June 4, 1904.

My dear Mrs. Drew, You will see from the above that we are
no more in Hampstead. After 26^ years' residence, we left it for
this large and delightfully situated house last Michaelmas ; and as this
house has been taken for nineteen years, we shall be quite venerable
people at the end of our lease, if indeed we live as long !

Thank you very much for your kind offer of the gift of Lord Acton's
Letters. I am well aware of how valuable a present they would be,
even as mere cash goes. But I do not feel it would be fair or right to
let you give me the book, unless I could promise a quid pro quo, in the

126 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

shape of some review or the like. And I see, on reflection, that I must
not undertake anything of the kind. For I am so absorbed in my still
unpublished book, that my health is, anyhow, well-nigh breaking down
under the strain ; and now, after a five months' break, given entirely
to working for my friend Abbe Loisy, I have (next week) to get back
to that and to work up to a finish. And even when I have done (not
before Christmas, I expect), there is another (no doubt much shorter)
piece of work, which has been promised by me, as my next doing, since
now nearly two years ago. So, with the sole possible exception of
Abbe Loisy requiring my aid (a still living worker, fighter and sufferer,
having necessarily, especially if a labourer within one's own special
subject, a prior claim upon one, over and above any other man, gone to
God), I am sure of not being free before next Easter.

I have not yet read the " Letters," except half a dozen in the

type-written copy of them which Mr. Wilfrid Ward had for a little

while. And I certainly must and will read them. But pray bear with

me, if I put on record my double impression of them, impression

based, it is true, upon no intimate knowledge of the writer, yet in so far

worth having, I think, as it sprang up spontaneously in the mind of one

inside the same great Church to which Lord Acton belonged, and of

one, moreover, who, if he is incomparably less learned in general or

Church History than that writer, now knows Rome, i.e. the local

Roman Church Authorities, at least as well, certainly with a longer

intercourse than he. I have now had altogether fully 5 years of

Roman residence and constant touch with those behind the scenes there.

Now, unless I entirely deceive myself, I am as little of an Ultramontane

as was Ld. A. himself ; and the points I specially care about, in matters

of learning, are having about as difficult and trying a time, as those that

specially interested him. And I thoroughly feel the charm of his

simplicity, unworldliness, religiousness and general magnanimity. But

I simply cannot shake off the impression, strong as though it were simply

an ultimate sense-perception, that, very early in life, he ended by being,

on some points, a man of idees fixes, and that views which I too hold,

for the most part, to be survivals of a hampering and now not really

justifiable kind, became for him the expressions of criminals and men

beyond the borders of a gentleman's toleration. Now I am, please God,

entirely for truth : still I would let even a hopelessly mediaeval mind

share in that generosity of interpretation which I must ever seek to

practise, unless I would become an indirect fanatic. Was Huxley,

after all, truly tolerant when he declared that tolerance involved the

intolerance of intolerance ? I think, most decidedly not. And really,

my dear Mrs. Drew, if to take care to keep on shying " chunks of old

red sandstone " at Rome and all its works, and to prod up others not to

go to sleep over this sacred occupation : if that be a central duty, and

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 127

one to carefully keep one's weather-eye fixed upon : well, does not the
average man in the street still do enough of this ? And could we not
turn to a preponderance of pure affirmation in our lives ? I fear then
that I am too little Protestant to find any rest in that predominance of
anti-Protestantism, which Ultramontanism is so largely ; and too little
Ultramontane to find food for my soul in that direct and absorbing
anti-Ultramontanism which I find continuously in Ld. A. For after
all, in my own mind and soul at least, extremes do turn out to meet ;
and after boyhood, and the tilting-at-dragons period, I soon came to
find that by such turns of mind I certainly damaged my own self, but
I doubt much whether I much hurt or hit anybody else.

We so little know young Lord Acton, or his very pleasant bride,
that we have neither been asked, nor are we thinking of going to, the
Wedding.

With many thanks for all your kind and valued expressions and
Mary's love,

Yours very sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

June 30, 1904.

My very dear Friend, Had I the time, I could and would write a
series of long letters, instead of this scrappy note. Never mind : we
shall soon, thank God, be meeting, for a good long time. Hence now
I only jot down unadjournable items.

(1) As Miss Petre will have told you, Archbishop Mignot is
coming to stay with us here, on the I5th or i6th, for 10 days : and I
much wish you could and would come up to town to see him. I would
arrange for you to have a good long talk alone with him ; and indeed
you could see him repeatedly : and I think that it would be a very
useful thing that you should see him. Though not an official for
nothing, he is (though past 60) still a man who learns, and could be
told and would say things, and useful, stimulating things, which neither
his friends nor (and still less) he himself could well write. I am planning
two nights for him at Oxford, -arriving there for lunch on one day,
and leaving after breakfast two days after, for Cambridge, probably, for
one night. And this excursion is likely to take place during the middle
of his stay, .say on July 20-23rd. So, if you come up, it would have
to be for before or after, or for before and after, those days. Think
favourably of the plan, please.

(2) I would sooner little or nothing should be said (unless it were
necessary for getting permission to come up) of the Archbishop's visit
till it is on, or all but on. For I want to be able to make him^see

128 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

only a select set of people, only few officials, either in London or
at Oxford. ...

(3) If you know of men (unknown to me) whom M. ought to
see, pray tell me of them, and they shall be asked. The difficulty is,
of course, the language. M. talks not a word of English, nor does he
understand it when spoken. In Rome I found how much this crippled
intercourse. The capital Lilley will come and help at Oxford : he is
at home in colloquial French. Of priests I have only, so far, got
yourself, van den Biesen, Dessoulavy, Goodrich, Scannell, Bidwell, and
perhaps Thurston. M. will also no doubt visit Archbishop Bourne,
M. has, I know, real influence with him. Of laymen (Catholic) I have
got Wilfrid Ward, Dell, Williams, Gibson, Coore, and a few more
Oh, and, among priests, of course Dom Butler and Mgr. Scott. Fawkes
will hardly be back, I fancy. Besides Oxford (and perhaps Cambridge),
I am taking M. to the Tower, the Abbey, Houses of Parliament, British
Museum, Windsor and Eton : and have got good men for taking us in
tow at these several shows.

(4) This is all a distinctly costing affair for me, it means ten
precious days clean taken out of my work : and deafness means crippled-
ness and a handsome crop of little humiliations during such social attempts.
The book meanwhile is really getting on again : but I want to abstain
from all forecasting of time : labour, prayer, and as much serenity and
cheerful toil as I can manage and God will give me : and the rest will
find its own level.

(5) The enclosed letter from Casciola concerns yourself at least as
much as it does me. Please answer him, as to your affairs, yourself;
and let me have it back, when quite done with.

(6) I have had some other significant and interesting letters as to
the " XL. EL." : a note from Pere Lapotre, S.J., as explosively pro-L.
as anyone could wish ; a long letter from that young Papal " guardia
nobile " Prince Giovanni Borghese, ditto ; an interesting and satis-
factory long letter from Laberthonniere, who keeps remarkably free,
I think, from Blondel's curious absolute-mindedness, wherever these
Christological points are under discussion ; and two short letters from Bl.
himself, warmly affectionate as to my person, but not moving, or moved,
one inch or half an inch, in the questions themselves. I feel as if his
mind had somehow ceased to grow, except to defend and throw up
ingenious reasons and hypotheses to defend a position or rather a com-
bination of positions, taken up, apparently, for good and all. You must
see these and other letters, when I get to you.

(7) If you have some more Letter to a Professor and The Church
and the Future, I could, I think, well place a dozen of each. And has
no reprint of Oil and Wine been possible ? That I find the easiest to
place and most uniformly effective of all your writings.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 129

(8) I naturally think much about the alternative you referred to
again in your last letter, that suggested by Bremond's act. 1 But
what strikes me as the turning-point in the whole question is not where
you would have the externally freer life, where you could move about
most, and have circumstances most to your general advantage. For it
is not as if you would be satisfied with being allowed to think or even
say your ideas unmolested, say, somewhere in Bishop Allen's diocese,
as one of his Sec. Priests. But you want, if not formal permission, at
least actual non-molestation, in the matter of continuous writing and
publication, at least of a pseudonymous kind. And this liberty you have
actually conquered for yourself where you are ; whilst, with any move,
it would have, surely, all to be conquered right over again. And
indeed, I fancy that the lesser close-knitness of the world into which
you would move, would, if it pressed less definitely for ordinary purposes,
be less, not more, capable of being as definitely located and checked as
can be done with your very military body. With Bremond the case
strikes me as different in three respects : his mind and character are so
much less religious or mystical than yours, and have derived little or no
gain from his old connection ; he has been allowed to be a vagabond
for so many years that he is almost more like a spirit, a breath of wind
coming and going, than a man exercising a definite influence from a
definite spot ; and he will ever be so much more a predominantly
literary writer, that his views can and will pass muster where these same
ideas, directly explicitated, would raise all sorts of opposition.

I must indeed shut up now.

Your very affectionate Friend,

FR. v. HUGEL.

Gertrude was present, but one of three educated persons, in a crowd
of 5000 poor, in the " Cortile della Pigna " in the Vatican, 3 Sundays
back, at the Pope's Sermon on the Good Shepherd, how each one of
those poor, whom the old man in white beamed at in delightful self-
expansive fellow feeling, had an apostolate, some souls to love and help.
She is coming with me to Richmond.

To Father Tyrrell

June 12, 1905.

My very dear Friend, I am indeed glad to have at last heard from
you again ! It is true that I, too, have been silent for, I suppose, 6 weeks
at least ! The fact is that, ever since my L.S.S.R. paper on May and,
I have had a succession of nervous attacks and prostrations, of a kind
with which my earlier years were full, and which just now have only

1 Pere Bremond, S.J., had become a secular priest.

130 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

left me two little islets of three and four days each of work and balance,
jutting out above intervening weeks of waiting for the rise in the tide
of strength. I have, during this waiting time, purposely turned to
books which, whilst they should have been read long ago, are not of a
kind that I would read when fit for direct occupation with even the
preparations for my book. So I have carefully browsed through
Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay, and Francis Darwin's
I vol. Life of his Father. Macaulay is certainly a most lovable character,
full of tenderest domestic affection, but a profoundly uninteresting
mind ; or rather the mind becomes interesting to one as a vivid
exemplification of what is, after all, a very common form of human
mind : a form, surely, mysterious to anyone who believes in the omni-
present operation, of God's Spirit. For it is, this mind, as entirely
unmystical, as free too from any even vague sense of any incompleteness
of its own, as if the great Source and Crown of all mysticism were not
in the world and pressing upon each soul within it. Darwin is a deeply
attractive mind and heart : humble, self-diffident, with the grand, semi-
dumb objectivity of the instruments of God in the world ; without a
touch of " cleverness " ; ever effecting more than he knows or can at
all master himself. And if his loss of the religious sense is mysterious :
yet here, there was, at first, this sense : and when it went, D., up to the
very end, was quite evidently haunted by a sense that he himself was,
certainly in other respects, by now, a stunted being, and that very possibly
he had become such, in this matter also. I have come to the conclusion
that the " religion, a factor of life " view alone can (theistically) explain
such cases. For only if there are other than religious facts and methods
which ultimately matter, for the totality of life and for the well-being
of religion itself : can one, I think, understand how God could will or
allow that immense absorption (by a humble mind) in non-religious facts
and methods should issue, for that mind, in not formal unbelief
(D. never ended in that], but in an obscuration and suspension of the old
religious clarities. . . ,

... As to your two unnamed chapters (of a magnum opus ?), they
are written with a most brilliant incisiveness : indeed, probably too
much so, except for a first ebauche and working off of certain flashes of
insight and impulses of feeling. On p. 442, " But all this explicit
theology ? Theology of the former " strikes me as admirable ; and
again p. 446 (bottom) " at all times " p. 448 " Wesen des Katholi-
cismus " is most attractive to me. The idea running throughout the
whole of Christianity as a quality and leaven coming to purify and enrich
the divinely willed but man-corrupted substance of the extant " non-
Christian " and " non- Jewish " religions as well as of Judaism itself :
is admirable. Perhaps this really involves your inversion of the ordinary
view, your making Paganism as a substance and system swallow

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 131

Christianity as a spirit and quality, and then undergo a modification
from this, so to speak, swallowed pill. But I am tired ; my mind works
slowly : I am not sure, and so far it does not flash upon me as true.
Here and there too I find touches of feeling which touch me as, most
understandable, but, still, objectively somewhat excessive.

I am very glad you are corresponding with D- . His is a very

clear and courageous mind and will. But I feel with him, as I do with
van den Biesen, with Fawkes, with Marcel Hebert, how easy it is for a
scholastically trained mind to remain in close bondage to precisely the
weakest side of its method ; and this entirely unbeknown to the mind
thus remaining, through that mind developing a (conscious or uncon-
scious) antithesis, full and relentless against its former task-master. The
later dependence is one of angry and bitter, or too deep down to be
conscious, contradiction : the dependence is none the less as complete,
or perhaps more mischievous in some ways, as ever it was. In D.'s
case I am thinking specially of his boiling down the religious instinct to
a moral one. I feel as I get on with my book, with a certain sadness,
how few, I do not say of the old school, but of the new, will be with me.
I shall largely have to create the temper and requirement which I am
attempting to satisfy. For not in the least to get rid of all Metaphysic,
all Transcendence, is my aim ; but on the contrary to show how
Metaphysics and Transcendence of some, indeed a definite, kind are in
all religion : and how these are still imperative and possible. I should
like you to get him to read Tiele's Introduction to the Science of
Religion, or (and) Morris Jastrow's Study of Religion : for these
books not of philosophers (as Ed. Caird can of course be styled), but of
simple observers and classifiers of extant and dead religions, bring out,
largely unconsciously, the specific, other-than-simply moral, character of
all religion. In yourself I only sporadically feel the anti-metaphysical
bias possessing you. I am never afraid of this, in the sense of feeling
that perhaps, there too, you are right ; but only afraid in the sense of
not wishing that you should, for our times and in your way, become
the exponent of the kind of trenchant anti- this or that, which one can
study in the system of the Socini or of Calvin. Both these systems are
through and through antitheses, and hence through and through dependent
upon the systematic, full-blown scholasticism which they oppose step by
step. And how grandly Dilthey has, in the jlrchiv articles, brought
out the indefinitely greater (in part no doubt other] reality of which
those scholastic systems were the most inadequate, largely disfiguring
expressions, a reality which the Socini and Calvin, with all their
differences from each other, equally failed to seize !

I often think with deep sympathy and a good deal of downright
pain, of how much God has given you to suffer. I doubt altogether
whether you would have escaped much suffering even though you had

132 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

never seen an S.J., indeed had never become a Priest or a Catholic at
all ; although you would, of course, have escaped much, at least if the
first of these three possible alternatives had obtained with you. For
I always feel that the initial, the all-englobing, all-aggravating, yet (of
course) also all-fructifying peculiarity of your case, for which neither
St. Ignatius, the Pope, or even Christ, but only God, in the mysterious
constitution of life and of our mixed natures, is responsible, is that
mentally you apprehend, and more and more, the exceeding variety in
unity of all reality, and the slow, ever incomplete, ever correction-
begging character of all our apprehensions, still more of all our livings
of them ; whereas emotively, you are prime sauteur, hie et nunc, neck-or-
nothing to an equally rare degree. A German brain, an Irish heart :
can there be a more fruitful combination, if the owner is heroically
faithful ? Can there be, faithful or not, a more costing, adventurous
one ?

To Father Tyrrell

Oct. 9, 1905.

My very dear Friend, Four things, one of which is a big and
difficult affair, have now accumulated ready to my hand ; and I really
must no longer put off communicating them, although I am very tired
just now.

No doubt the tiredness comes from attempting to carry on my very
close and difficult book-work (clearing up and compressing my rough
draft of the last chapters) together with attending to Semeria who has
turned up, with his friend Canon Fracassini of Perugia, and is simply
voracious for sights, interviews, discussions, etc. . . .

. . . Semeria has been talking much to me, and (I think) extraordin-
arily well, as to the present situation in the Church, the right and wise
course for us to take, and the conditions under which we can expect to
get and keep the largest amount of such elbow-room as we require if
our life-work is to continue. Now I know well that he is no English-
man, no S. J., and not George Tyrrell. Yet his knowledge of the Italian
and Roman S.J. and General Authorities is most extensive, I fancy,
in some respects at least, more extensive than your own. He has
watched not a few cases of change from within to without Religious
Orders the S.J. amongst these. And he and his friends have got
their troubles and trials, not uninstructive even for yourself, whose
temperament, I admit, is profoundly different from his own. And
why his arguments impress me is, no doubt, that they but enforce and
re-awaken my own deepest Impressions and misgivings ; and thus explain
to me why I so woefully hung fire, in all but personal sympathy and
clearness of ideas as to the general Catholic temper and position, when
I was with you this time. His contention then is that there is little

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 133

difference, except at most in degree, between the things that try
you, where you are, and the ideals and temper that possess the dominant
school of officials who are at the head of us all ; that there is no shadow
of disloyalty towards your narrower allegiance, as long as your authorities
are kept cognisant of the fact of your anonymous writing, and that they
put up with it ; that even when you left them, the more characteristic
part of your work, the training of our more advanced people, would
still have to continue anonymous, and would still not at all represent what
the central authorities want ; that in an Order you can put pressure
upon officials and can come to a working arrangement, which secures
you a liberty far greater than you would be allowed outside of it (he is
convinced that both you, especially, and he have had, as a matter of
fa.ct,far more liberty both in the things that have been formally approved
and in those that have been winked at, than would ever, in both direc-
tions, have been achieved in the ranks of the secular clergy) ; and that
the general rule and determination ought to be, for all us poor forwards,
the sticking, each of us, to our respective posts and making the very best
of them. I am sure that he sees, and I think I see still more clearly,
how difficult and painful is your situation : but he insists, and I think
he is right, upon facing the afterwards the alternative situation before
you. He entirely refuses to accept Bremond's case as at all a true
parallel to yours. Your books would greatly lose, as selling articles, by
any such change ; and instead of your writings, at least the more
conservative ones, having a good chance of influencing the more
moderate of our opponents, they would then meet with closed minds
and wills.

I see, of course, why I did not myself speak out in this sense to you ;
and why, even now, agreeing with it, as I know I do, in my heart of
hearts, I still so largely give it as his view, rather than as mine. It is
that you are a sensitive, very sensitive man, a Celt of poor health, and
profound depressibleness ; that perhaps, you really could not, somehow,
buckle to at the work and load, just as it lies ready to your hand ; and
that staying on would but harden and embitter your feelings, not only
to the Order but towards all that is even indirectly associated with it.
I have ever feared and disliked being heroic vicariously. And that
one who knows you so well and so disinterestedly as M. D. P. is on the
other side, influences me much, of course. And yet, even now, I feel
I ought to give my poor little testimony in favour of the other side.
For even yet, I have a feeling, the General hesitates and might well be
willing to arrange and let you stay. Of course, you would feel this
very difficult, now, after sending in that letter. But he might make,
at least under suggestions, certain proposals or concessions, which
would make you feel you could stay, at least as far as the fact of having
sent that letter goes.

134 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

I certainly thought much of that letter very strong : but was it
very strong as against things specific (now) to the S.J.'s ? All things
point I feel this profoundly with S. to the wisest, truest, at bottom
most costing, course being, nowadays, for us all (short of the clearest
call of conscience not only away from this or that, but to some definite
other religious, positive position), to stick to the Church in which we
find ourselves; and this, especially, when that Church happens,
whatever may be its excesses and disfigurements, to represent, alone
in that degree and clearness, certain fundamentally important elements
of religion. And the arguments for leaving the Order as distinct from
the Church, I find it all but impossible to give them more solidity than
is involved in your de facto apparent inability to rough, weather and
overcome the no doubt painful stress and strain of living on in that
very tight cabin, with the storm lashing over the deck above and around.

I fear all this is not lucidly nor powerfully put : but I feel I must
put it, even if feebly and obscurely. I love you, can you doubt it ?
as I love at most some four or five souls now living our poor earthly life
throughout many a country, race, position, sex, and religion. And
I feel saddened and benumbed when the vivid and ever recurring
impression seizes me that what looks like a coming deliverance is, at
bottom, a diminution of your utility in and for the Church, and through
it, for religion at large.

Your ever affectionate old Friend,

FR. v. H.

To the Able Albert Houtln

le 5 avril 1906.

Monsieur 1'Abbe, J'aurais voulu pouvoir vous remercier tout-de-
suite pour votre gracieux envoi des premieres bonnes-feuilles de votre
nouvelle Question Biblique; et maintenant que je le fais, je d&irerais
pouvoir le faire avec quelqu'ampleur et precision. Mais helas,
1'Influenza me tient en ses griffes, et du fond de mon lit, ainsi affaibli,
je ne puis guere voir ou dire grand' chose.

Cependant, je ne veux plus defer rer ma pauvre reponse, et je vous
prie de croire que mes remerciments ne sont pas moins sinceres que
s'ils avaient pu tre immediats. II est vrai, que je n'ai pu encore que
feuilleter ces pages si pleines et qui certes, a moins que "la conjuration
du silence" parvient a en empe"cher une lecture etendue parmi les
notres, ne pourront manquer de susciter bien des coleres. Si je ne
voyais que vous vous etes deja, vous-mSme, pleinement represent^ les
consequences ecclesiastiques tres graves que la publication de ce volume
entrainera, bien surement (je me dis que, vu que la suspension existe

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 135

deja, ce ne pourrait etre moins que 1' Excommunication) je tacherais
de vous eveiller pleinement a ces consequences certaines. Mais vous
les avez envisagees, vous avez decide que votre jeu vaut meme cette
chandelle-la. Apres cela, ce serait une impertinence que de revenir
sur ce point.

Mais cela ne m'empeche point d'etre bien sur qu'un tel livre, penible
qu'en soit la necessite, pourrait, tout de meme, faire beaucoup de bien
a condition qu'il laisse le lecteur, malgre tout son mecontentement
avec les precedes Romains, tout plein de foi en la realite et fecondite
tnepuisables de la religion en general et du Christianisme en particulier.
J'y ajoute cette condition parcequ'il me semble difficile de bien garder
un tel equilibre, et sa difficulte est egalee par sa supreme importance.
Et j'ai cru trouver maisjen'ai encore que feuillete, que vous donniez
un peu trop en le sens de ceux qui voudraient egaler une connaissance
complete des etapes d' une doctrine avec unjugement sur sa valeur. . . .

To Father Tyrrell

April 20, 1906:

' . . . I have just finished Ibsen's Brand, and am now in the
midst of Peer Gynt : what marvellous insight and wisdom ! Surely
a great poet, and a thinker of the first class ! Philip Wicksteed's
little book Henrik Ibsen has helped me much towards understand-
ing it all. But I intend not to let Ibsen go again, till I have
got all the increase out of him, that I can manage ! I am also
a-working Troeltsch's long but astonishingly vigorous and illuminating
paper on the development of Protestantism, in that rich volume Die
Xtliche Religion, in which I have also given a second, most careful
and grateful reading to H. J. Holtzmann's noble and bracing sort of
Mount Nebo outlook on to the Promised Land the future of Religion
in its relation to Culture. A fine, very fine old man, and no mistake.
From among ours, I have now gone through, most carefully,
M.D.P.'s fine, because sympathetic and generous, estimate of Nietzsche,
and about one-third the most important parts of Houtin's new
Question Biblique in proof. Like its predecessor it is of an extra-
ordinary clearness and wit, and will cause even greater anger, in so far
as they will notice it at all. I wish, though, one felt more in him of
what so profoundly attracts me in Holtzmann, the sense of how deep
are the prerequisites of science, especially of Historical Science, so
different this H. Sc. from Mathematico-Physical Methods. That
tendency to take the middle distance, the mathematico-physical clear
but artificial construction of a part of Reality, for the whole of our
experience, or at least as its adequate and final type and measure : this

136 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

drift which tends to make our Clerics, as soon as ever they cease to be
orthodox Scholastics, into merely heterodox ones, cheerfully "clear"
Philistines of the older Unitarian, Deistic kind : I find much of it here.
Yet that has, of course, nothing to do with his immediate subject and
grievances, where his castigations are admirably to the point.

To Father Tyrrell

Dec. 1 8, 1906.

. . . Loisy gave me the opening the other day, to sum up how I
was feeling we ought to act, and be prepared to act, just now. The
poor words were no tactical programme, they but represented what one
felt, at one's peacefullest, before God and in full touch with work and
suffering. I thus thought and felt, that four great facts and duties
confronted us. (i) The Church, i.e. ecclesiastical officials, has a
right to many, even great sacrifices on our part, but not simply to
anything and everything. We will try not to work out any plan or
scheme, " this I can and will do," " that I can't and won't do," still
less will we attempt an impossible map of the respective ranges of those
things. And we will even try and keep ourselves ready to give the
benefit of the doubt to these authorities, and to sacrifice all pure con-
venience or simple ambition or self-love. Yet even your case alone
that demand of Cardinal Ferrata showed plainly how well within the
range of practical politics is their asking of you and us things that it
would be wrong for us to accept.

(2) The Church is more and other than just these Churchmen ;
and religion is more, and largely other, than even the best theology :
and we, i.e. he, L., you, M. D. P., I our housemaids too, are true,
integral portions of the Church, which in none of its members is simply
teaching, in none of its members is simply learning. We do not and
must not accept the restriction of " Church " and " Religion" to mean
those lesser, professional and reflex things ; yet we will labour not, on
our part, to sink to the level of our opponents, and not, thus, to exclude
that profession and objective work from amongst the constituents of
the complete Church organism and the functioning of religion among
men.

(3) Already these two positions are absolutely unworkable unless
we are willing and perseveringly determined slowly and deliberately
to let drop, to damp down, as far as possible to exterminate, cleverness
as distinct from wisdom, clearness as distinct from depth, logic as distinct
from operativeness, simplicity as distinct from life. Nothing is easier
than unconsciously to retain the ultramontane Fragestellung, and then
to answer this with the most contemptuous negative ; nothing is more

VON Ht) GEL'S LETTERS 137

readily achieved than to take, say, Cardinal Merry as the true, sincere
type of Catholic and to show that none of our group are, then, Catholics
at all. Indeed the thing is so easy, that quick-witted men like Houtin
ought to feel somewhat ashamed of their apparent pride and pleasure
in pointing out something so glaringly obvious. That I for one cannot
go along this path ; and that much getting into the open air, much
(largely) informal prayer, and much persevering hard work, in com-
bination, bring me, in my best moments, to a frame of mind where all
the deepest, truest, alone really fruitful work and insight in these
greatest things, appears as achieved in this sort of but approximately
" logical," obtuse-seeming, costingly wise, not brilliantly clever, rumi-
nant, slow, if you will stupid, divinely blest, thorn-crowned, ignored,
defeated, yet soul-inspiring, life-creating fashion.

My fourth point was the continuously greater depth and range of
Religion as against Science, and the importance of not whittling down
the former simply to the level of the latter. My own impression is
that all of our group, I certainly feel it for my own case, have need
to bear the No. 3 especially in mind ; and that he in particular should
never forget the No. 4 ; whereas we all (at least when we sufficiently
retain Nos. 3 and 4) are good at Nos. I and 2.

A very peaceful, fruitful Christmas to you, valiant friend, who have
done so much : so much that even your great sufferings and trials have
not been, .thank God, too great a price.

To Professor Clement Wett

April 24, 1907.

I am hoping to have the pleasure, it is ever a very real one,
of meeting you to-morrow evening at the "Synthetic" Dinner and
Meeting. And my poor conscience has been pricking me badly, for
months and months, in your regard, since, in fact, last August, when
I got that very kind and suggestive letter from you, about my Dublin
Review Paper on " Experience and Transcendence."

But the fact is that, when that letter of yours reached me, I was
away, on my holiday, from my books and papers, and with that (then
recent) Papal Commission's Decision as to the Pentateuch requiring me
to turn to other, Biblical-Critical, matters. And our eldest daughter
then took to being alarmingly ill, right up to October. And once
back here, I was immersed in the finishing up of my book, a work
which was finally off my hands only on April 6th, not 3 weeks
ago !

I hope, then, you will forgive me, and that you have not, meanwhile,
thought me very discourteous and unappreciative of your letter, one

138 VON HO GEL'S LETTERS

of the five or six which gave me the most pleasure in connection with
that Paper of mine.

Your two points both interested me much. As to Aristotle, I know
him much less well, I probably care for him less, than you do.
I dare say you are right in thinking that he did not think intellection to
be unsocial. It was not so much the passage you refer to, as his evident
delight in his picture of the lonely, self-contemplative God, and his
wish to assimilate the thinker's life to that divine life, which made me
feel that at least his trend, the logic of his ultimate thought, was towards
such lonely intellection even for man, in so far as man becomes perfect.

As to your second point, the nature of the intuition which exceeds
our powers of analysis, I do not hold that such intuition or instinct or
feeling, or whatever term we may use, is intrinsically non-rational.
I was and am aiming there at two things only : (i) As a matter of fact,
such obscure apprehensions ever, in this life at least, exceed the analytic
powers of the clear human reason ; and (2) the human reason, even at
its fullest and clearest, is not Reason pure and absolute, God alone is
the latter. I think, then, of those intuitions, etc., as resolvable, in part
by ourselves, entirely by God, into clear comprehensions.

What I cannot abide, is any view that would make man contain
God, instead of God contain man : we shall ever have to look up to
God, to apprehend, not comprehend Him ; and our reason will never
become the Reason, Yet our reason even here is exceeded only by a
higher Reason, a Reason indefinitely nobler and greater, but not
simply contradictory of our own. We are not, and never will be, God ;
but already here we can be, and at our best we are, God-tike. I hope
that you will think that this will do. If you come to the Dinner
to-morrow night, let us sit beside each other, and talk it over !

I have just been for a week in Paris, a deeply interesting time,
seeing Loisy, Le Roy, Boutroux, Bergson, Seailles, etc.

Yours ever sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL

To Father Tyrrell

May 14, 1907.

... I have now carefully read your " Da Dio o dagli Uomini "
Paper. It is most striking : so strong and true, so pathetically winning,
in its great main contention. I purposely formulate my appreciation
this way, because I must confess that, in as it were the prolegomena of
the matter, I retain certain pretty acute perplexities of religious instinct.
My old brain is too fagged and preoccupied by other things which have
hie et nunc to be done, a wife and three daughters away, of itself means
much, almost endless, detail of decision of all kinds adding itself on to

VON HU GEL'S LETTERS 139

my ordinary work, to be able to work out a coherent criticism. But
I feel strongly, somehow, that your treatment of the old transcendent
conception of God as requiring to be reformulated, en toutes pieces, by
an immanental one, is somehow a bit of most tempting, yet nevertheless
impoverishing, simplification. God is certainly not, in any degree or sense,
simply (spatially) outside of, or above, us ; and these spatial pictures
have indeed all to be interpreted in terms of spiritual experience and
spiritual reality. But this experience itself is essentially as truly of God
transcendent as of God immanent ; of a Spirit indefinitely more spiritual,
a reality which is nobler and of a higher nature than our highest, and
leaves us with a noble thirst as well as of this same Spirit as penetrating
us through and through, and as satisfying our cravings. If one were to
take your clear-cut Immanentism as final and complete, that noblest
half of the religious experience of tip-toe expectation, of unfulfilled
aspiration, of sense of a Divine Life, of which our own but touches the
outskirts, would have no place. I see that by the emphatic admission
of this (I think quite essential) Dualism of spiritual experience and
movement, it is more difficult to formulate a vigorously coherent
criticism of the absolutist authority conception than is yours here.
Still, you are so right in your general conclusions, and yet the preliminary
point I refer to seems to me so certain, that I cannot doubt them to
be, somehow, reconcilable, although I do not clearly see how, just
now at least. . . .

To Miss Maude Petre

May 23, 1907.

My dear good brave Maude Petre, I hear that you are a bit out
of sorts, with that trying thing more or less of a nervous breakdown.
How well I know this ! At this moment I too am far from brilliant,
in such ways, having had to wait now for little gusts of working
power, for a week or more, and getting them for two or three short
spells at most. So I can sympathise, even from my own immediate
feelings, but far more, of course, because of the many years of my life,
when I was, I am sure, far worse than you can be.

I am truly sorry, and can but hope that you are being, and will be,
very good, very self-disciplined, and wisely self-considering, and will do
whatever an experienced Doctor, and one who knows you well, would
or does recommend, even though it may cross any other plans you may
have.

Our group is having to bear such a long strain, that it is no wonder
we are all more or less broken down ; yet our cause is so great and
inspiring, and the war is likely to last still so long a time, that we must
simply do all we can to keep and get not only passably well, but with a

HO VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

surplusage of nerve and vitality, things which, depend upon it, will
be wanted to the last shred. After all, it matters comparatively little
if we can say, write or do much or often ; but it matters much, that
when we thus energise, our action should have a vigour and body, a
" go " and a buoyancy, all which, of course, are things dependent, in
considerable part, upon physical, especially nervous health.

Those young fellows in Milan are acting admirably, like the
chivalrous, high-minded gentlemen, and strong-souled, tough-willed
Christians and Catholics that they are their answer to Rome is a very
model of what such things should be. They declare themselves ready
to receive respectfully and to give practical heed and application to all
scientific, scholarly criticism and correction of scientific or scholar's
mistakes ; to all disciplinary directions as to disciplinary wrong-doing ;
and to all theological or spiritual censures of theological or spiritual
errors. But they cannot, at the bidding of the Congregation, simply
suppress a Review x planned and organised during years, and one which
has hardly yet begun, since, in so doing, they would put a formidable
weapon into the hands of the enemies of the Church, viz. a demonstration
that even thoroughly religious-tempered and respectful historico-critical
and philosophical research and thought in matters of religion, of a
thoroughly unofficial, preliminary kind, is not tolerated, is impossible,
within the Roman Catholic Church. That they have maturely con-
sidered the grave possible consequences of their act ; but their love for
the Church forces them, with grief and reluctance, respectfully but quite
finally to take up this position. And they promise to pray and strive
their very utmost so to improve, on and on, their tone and bearing, and
so to profit by any and all detailed official and other criticism or censure,
as to manifest to all their faithful love and inalienable devotion to the
Church.

They have met with remarkably moderate, respectful treatment
from Cardinal Ferrari and other ecclesiastics of a quite old-fashioned
type, and seven further Italian Priest subscribers have come in, since
the censure whilst only one subscriber (an It. Priest) has left them.
I believe they are entirely right, in hoping for great things from this
stand of theirs. But everything points to Rome being decided to go all
lengths in the conflict. Yet, as they say, disciplinary weapons are
soon exhausted, whilst ideal armour and weapons are ever fresh and
inexhaustible. They will, I firmly believe, remain warm, moderate,
respectful, and unshakeably firm. If they do this, they must win,
after much suffering, perhaps.

Have myself had further very good letters of sympathy will keep
entirely mum, and will not write for them for the present nor till the

1 Rinnovamento.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 141

book is out, at all events. But I have already assured them that I do
not drop them, not, at least, as long as they are so admirably all we
want and love.

Yours affectionately, my good, most useful,

most necessary old friend and fellow-fighter,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

Oct. r, 1907.

My very dear Friend, I have now twice read both The Times
articles, 1 and also its leader upon them. There can, I take it, be no
serious doubt as to two things. One, that the substance of those two
papers of yours, the philosophical and theological analyses and positions,
are deep and true and great; and that there was and is a crying need for
such expositions either now or soon. And I am deeply grateful and
touched for and by that noble bit, in the second article, about your being
and remaining a Catholic, whatever may happen ; and concerning
those great figures of Catholic post-reformation Saints and Scholars that
cheer us on. These latter passages are most appropriate, and give a
most grateful relief and the proper setting and interpretation to the
polemical passages. Thank you for them, again and again.

The second thing is that although, perhaps, written less angrily
than the Giornale d'ltalia letter, this double paper is also, of course,
very hot, vehement, and sarcastic. I hope very much that this heat,
which, in some places, is so apt, and in all is so understandable, may not,
in the long run at least, deflect otherwise likely and winnable minds
from the substantial content and real, final aim of your papers. I must
admit that, even now and in spite of everything, I have a feeling as to the
pathetic position of the Pope, holding that most difficult of posts not
through his own choosing, a peasant of simple seminary training and
speaking to some 200 million souls, of whom doubtless a good nine-
tenths, at least, are even less cultured than himself, and whom he is
sincerely trying to defend against what he conceives to be deadly error.
We can afford to be magnanimous ; and is it not a duty to be so ? This
is not meant, of course, as a criticism of speaking, or even of plain
speaking, and with your grand mastery of the subject ; it only concerns
the question of personal tone.

I would hardly like to bring up even this, secondary criticism, did
I not find, from a letter of Alfieri's received this morning (in which his
love and admiration for, and care for your influence and for its continuous
extension shine out most touchingly), that some of the young fellows he

1 See Memoir, ante, p. 26.

142 VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS

knows and attracts have been somewhat seriously pained and upset by
the personal tone, the tone towards the Pope, of your Letter to the
Giornale <T Italia, even though the very young fellow who writes to
him, thus hurt, says how much he, at the same time, feels your letter to
be " piena di sacre verita." I have also had a letter from Rome, from
another determined well-wisher and admirer of yours, with the same
distinction and mixture of helpedness and of distress.

I cannot help feeling that there is probably a good deal of truth in
what Alfieri says, that it would be well if you could and would now
cease to write to the Liberal Italian papers, which, of course, amounts
to the Italian papers generally, and could and would concentrate your
writing, in and for Italy at least, upon articles for Rinnovamento. A. is
anxious to know what further Papers you may have for them ; and
continues to feel, as well he may, the honour it is to have you writing
for them. . . .

I am feeling strongly for myself, and venture to hope you may feel
the same for yourself also, how desirable it will be to keep clear of any,
even apparent identification with Paul Sabatier, so honest a man, but
one who certainly has no ultimate and abiding belief in or care for a
whole number of elements of religion, occasions, vehicles and expressions
of it, which will ever remain dear to us ; and again, to keep clear of
Loyson, this, even more. The latter matter has been suggested to
me, of course, by Dell's forwarding, through me, H. L.'s Article for
yourself. I am bound to admit that it somewhat shocks me, to see
D. associating, so easily and without pain of any kind, with L. For,
surely, whatever one may think, in abstracto, of celibacy, a priest who
abandons it puts himself out of court for pleading effectively for the
difficult reforms we require. Nothing is more plain from every word
of the Encyclical, what a priceless force is the " austerity " of our lives.
Yet genial hobnobbing with L. would, at once, furnish materials for
suspicion on this score, also.

Very affectionate old Friend,

F. v. H.

So deeply sorry for all your pain and worry ;

So deeply grateful for all that is so great and deep in your present
work and writing ;

So entirely understanding, thank God, even where I feel certain
limitations and imperfections. Even if these latter be really there,
God will, from our sufferings and good intentions, build up something
that will include all our gold and exclude such dross as may here and
there depreciate it.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 143

To Father Tyrrell

Oct. 24, 1907.

My most dear Friend, Well, it has then come, the sentence which
we were getting to hope might, after all, not come ! * Fiat : we have
but to see to it, each one of us, that we may do, and advise, and influence,
and be influenced, in the right, the best and deepest, the most fully
Catholic direction.

After thinking the position over for some two hours now, I can
find only three (I do find three) points about which I am not yet clear.

(But first let me make it quite plain that I should think it simply
wrong of you to make any " absolute," " unqualified," " unlimited "
submission. I would not, at least I ought not, to do such a thing, if
ever the bitter waters got as near to my lips as they have done to yours ;
hence I clearly cannot advise such a course in your case, or even keep a
discreet silence on the point.)

1 . Ought you to communicate the fact of this Excommunication,
at this moment, to any but one or two discreet friends ? (I am deeply
touched and honoured by being thus told at once ; but I will not tell
anyone, not my wife, not Loisy, etc., until I see quite clear on this point.)
It is, I think, evident that they want first to wait, for some days, to see
if you will " submit," before publishing their decision in any way. And
hence you are necessarily adding to, or keeping out, a further step in the
ladder of the case, according as you either let be known, or observe strict
reticence as to the fact of the Excommunication. I incline to complete
secrecy (Le from journalistic or other likely divulgers), and to wait
for them to publish the fact, after they have given you some time. It
strikes me as more dignified, more simple, more noble : and such things
and impressions matter supremely, I think.

2. Ought you, not to " submit " unconditionally, but to send
in an expression of regret, of retractation and of promise of non-repetition, .,
of such expressions, such a tone or temper, such directly anti-Pope's
person passages as, especially in the Giornale cT Italia article, have pained
or scandalised souls? Unless it is certain that they know you would
willingly make such an amende (even with the addition of conditional
retractation of some points in the theological arguments and pro-
positions), and certain too that they would reject it and everything
falling short of an " absolute " submission, 1 think you ought to send
in such a declaration. For then you would, once again, have done your
level best to content them, in all that is reasonable ; and when, later on
(very soon, if you did send in such a Declaration), this Declaration, even
though rejected by them, was published (presumably, with the rest of the
whole aHair), you would have undone whatever temporary obscuration or

1 The excommunication of Fr. Tyrrell by Rome.

144 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

pain you may have aroused in some really well-disposed but ill-prepared
minds by that tone, temper, etc. ; and you would (if they don't accept
your offer) have left one more, a most impressive testimony on record
that nothing limited and dignified will satisfy them. I think, somehow,
I am seeing clearly and rightly, on this important point.

3. Ought you (whether or not you act according to the affirmative
suggestions of (i) and (2)) not only (as I think you very wisely judge)
to keep silence as to the Excommunication in your coming writings, but
not to write (i.e. to publish) for some little while, (say up to the ist of
Jan., when the Hibbert article will and ought to appear ) ? I think so.
For this also would be deeply impressive, to all capable of being impressed.
It would be more eloquent, a good deal, even than the kind of silence
you already are determined to guard. . . .

To Father Tyrrell

Nov. 15, 1907.

My dearest Friend, I do indeed feel keenly the ungenerous, indeed
unjust, character of that circular of the Bishop, especially as coming in
answer to that grandly straight, strong and loyal letter of yours to him ;
and I do not wonder a bit that you thought it right, indeed necessary,
to print and circulate that letter of yours. No doubt that act of his will
distinctly increase the number of those, especially among the Clergy, who
feel with us. Your cousin is so tactful and worldly wise a man, that
I feel quite comfortable over anything that has thus his full study and
approbation.

As to the scalliwags and their approaches, I am not sure but that it
is wholesome, perhaps necessary, for us. It keeps us fully conscious of
what we might forget, of what Mrs. Charles, the strongly anti-Roman,
used to dwell upon so much : "We are none of us, none of the religious
bodies, groups and individuals, much of a success." If Rome, in its
average as we have it now, is enough severely to try a saint ; the scalli-
wags are mere dust and debris, representing a reaction which has only
succeeded in shrivelling up its votaries, and not in reforming those who
occasioned it. 1

Lilley, who held my copy of the Risposta, undertook to let you have
it at once. You can and will do it still better than him, and why
should you not make improvements and useful additions in the transla-
tion ? Only, Friend, you will do it, won't you, without letting yourself
be dominated by any (most understandable) "vendetta feeling ?

Perhaps the ideal, all-round man should be able to hate and pursue

1 " Scalliwags " -was a term applied by Tyrrell, in a letter to the Baron, to denote
some of his fellow exiles or refugees from the Church who had been approaching him.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 145

destructively, with the same directness and fulness, with which he would
love and construct. Perhaps, though I am far from sure even of this.
But I am very sure that, in any case, George Tyrrell is not that kind
of man. A dominant hatred and determination to destroy even a set
of men or an institution predominantly evil : such a disposition would,
the writer of this scribble is absolutely certain, shrivel up and evaporate
all the true power, all the deep glorious helpfulness of G.T., long before
he had done any serious execution upon those his enemies. May G. T.
keep realising this, and that we have no opponents who can do us or
our cause much harm, except in this our temptation, our weakness,
which might drive us into such sterilising negation and feverish
hate. . . .

Devoted old friend,

F. v. H.

To Professor Clement Webb

March 9, 1908.

I have, again and again, now during months past been pricked in my
conscience at the thought of you. For you so kindly volunteered to do
what you could towards procuring an honorary degree for my friend,
the much admired Prof. Ernst Troeltsch. Yet, in the midst of very
much work and now little health (a combination which makes every
extra letter a matter of appreciable difference to one), I comforted my
conscience with the plea that you would doubtless not act at all in the
matter unless and until you heard from me. And this being clear,
there was no more any pressure upon me to write : for I came, some
time ago, to change my mind in the matter to the following extent.

As much as ever, if possible more than ever, I hope some day to see
Troeltsch an Hon. Doctor of Oxford. He already deserves the honour
richly. But I have come to think that it would be a pity to get it him
before the publication of one of his two long-projected books. He has,
now for 1 2 or more years, been giving of his wonderfully rich and deep
best in articles and studies scattered about in some ten or more periodicals
and collections of the most varied kind. And I want to get additional
leverage in my attempts to move him on to his book production. Now
the prospect of such an honorary degree would put such a lever into my
hands. And so I am telling him that there will be a good prospect of
such a Degree, if he will but give us one of his two books. In that event,
it might, I hope, be even possible to get him a Doctorate conferred on
your grand occasion !

But if, as you see, I have, for the present, dropped all hopes and
wishes for Troeltsch, I am bound to admit that I have not done so with
respect to the Chanoine Ulysse Chevalier. And as I know that M. Paul

146 VON Ht) GEL'S LETTERS

Sabatier is, to-day or to-morrow, going down to Oxford, and will there
again attempt to interest your authorities in the matter, I venture to
write and tell you, how fully well deserved, how much appreciated, and
how very opportune an act I should consider such a conferment on the
part of your University.

There is no doubt, I have heard Mgr. Duchesne, an authority in the
matter, and a most fastidious, difficile critic, declare, that U. Chevalier's
various Repertoires are truly astonishing monuments of a lifetime of
devoted, single-minded research, of a kind which on this scale in this
subject-matter still, I believe, remains unique. And then towards the
end of this long, strenuous life has come that long-necessary, very
thorough, most courageous book on the "Santa-Casa of Loretto,"
a book the effects of which are already sure to be abiding and to clear
the ground of one of the least creditable legends to be found anywhere.
I have unequivocal evidence that the fine old man, still in his seventies,
full of daily hard work, would deeply appreciate such an act. And such
a procedure on the part of your University would be felt (I am speaking
with much knowledge) as an encouragement by a whole number of men
within the R. Catholic Church, who are working along more or less
the same lines and who, at present, have all to pass a time of the most
discouraging reaction. And, in this case at all events, such an act could
very easily be performed in such a way as not to evoke the slightest
impression of sheer, undignified, most undesirable contrariness to Rome.
Exactly in proportion as anything of the kind was avoided (altho', of
course, the Loretto book would, among the others, receive warm com-
mendation) would such a Degree produce (I am sure of it) a very
salutary impression at the Vatican. It is paradoxical, no doubt, yet
strictly true, that precisely the party now dominant which, in logic,
ought not to care a straw for what non-Roman Catholic institutions do
and think, is far and away more impressionable in these matters than
are my friends themselves.

Pray forgive this expression of my hopes and wishes.

Yours ever sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

P.S. I hope that you are not too much shocked by Loisy's Com-
mentary on the Synoptists. I am busy studying it, but have, so far,
only read the Introduction, and quite a short specimen of the Commen-
tary. I already note that the Introduction conveys, somehow, a far more
radical impression than does the Commentary ; that, in some important
respects, he reconquers for strict history a good deal that had seemed
relegated to uncertainty ; but that on certain crucial points he is more
daring and " advanced " than all but three or four living scholars. Yet
I feel, as strongly as ever, that what claims to be history cannot escape
being judged by historico-critical methods and tests. We are thus

VON Ht) GEL'S LETTERS 147

restricted to criticising his method, or the cogency of its particular
application as effected by him. I much want to help and keep as many
persons, of yours and of mine, clear and firm on this point, as possible
stampedes and panics are of no earthly use.

To Father Tyrrell

March 25, 1908.

My very dear Friend, I am so overwhelmed with work and things
to will and bear and such like, that I must number my remarks, and make
them as short, and hence (I fear) as dry as possible.

i. As to yourself. I feel very happy and confident in the con-
viction that this obscurity will pass by, and will leave a certain grand
poignancy and rich spirituality of tone, I mean something more so
even than ever before. Thus it has been with Eucken. When I first
got to know him, he was just returning from greater fog and darkness
than you are likely to traverse ; indeed, he had recently been all but
entirely negative, I mean, quite explicitly so. And look at him now,
with a grandly massive, joyous faith. I see clearly that, over and above
the intrinsic difficulties, two circumstances are added on for you, which
greatly intensify each one of those trials. For one thing, our theologians,
the official ones, have, during these 4 centuries, steadily allowed the
accounts to accumulate unpaid, unsorted, unacknowledged. What
wonder, then, that we are overwhelmed in this the day of long-deferred
reckoning ? We are thus required to face and to get through the
arrears of some 1 2 generations. And then your own temperament, on
one of its two sides, adds greatly to the difficulty. For was there ever a
more sensitively swift and absolute mind than yours ? I noticed this
so strongly when you went head over heels, and rolling as it were over
and over, into my " Experience & Transcendence " Paper, getting,
as it were, quickly through and out at the other side of it by a vivid,
I think even over-vivid, apprehension and surpassing of it. And then
with Bergson, the same thing, on a much larger scale. Successive
atmospheres simply suck you up for the time. This doubtless is one
chief cause and occasion of your literary power. But I pray and hope
the day may soon return when your other side, the deep mystical,
contemplative habit and attrait will again be so powerfully waked
up and nurtured, that you will regain a grand steadiness of foundation,
and in your very feeling as to the depths of life and of religion. With
that, you will be great ; without that, very unhappy.

2. As to the L.S.S.R. Paper, I am sure I could get you off it, if,
when the time (3rd Tuesday in May) comes, you find you have no light
yet. Better, in that case, certainly, not to speak. I can only think of

148 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

two subjects for you : (i) The philosophy of Henri Bergson, and its
religious utilisation. And (2) The consciousness of Our Lord, as
indicated by critico-historical research, and its normative value. But
(i) would absolutely require the "religious utilisation" or the like to
be worked in, for a study just simply of B. qua philosopher would not
suit our Society's object. And (2) would easily shock various of our
members ; although I feel sure that most noble, helpful things could be
said about it. ...

To Father Tyrrell

April 1 6, 1908.

My very dear Friend, I would have thanked you sooner for your
most kind and very valuable work over my Vol. 2, had I not been
obliged to go off to Wilton. . . .

I have already carefully read your general remarks and criticisms,
and see their wisdom. I shall do all I can to carry out the improvements
suggested ; but intend to wait till I get to Vol. 2 in the ordinary succes-
sion of the chapters. So far, I have only despatched, revised, to Dent,
Chapters I, II, III ; and Chapter IV willj perhaps, go off to-night.
I am sure that you must be right as to the persistent obscurity of my
view concerning the purificatory function of Science. Yet I live this
principle, more and more, and find that it gives sincerity to my scientific
work and reality and tenderness to my religion. Hence I cannot but
feel that I have got hold of something true and important. May I
succeed, if not in the book, then elsewhere, in putting it sufficiently well
to induce men to try it in practice. That is about the full height of my
ambition. As to a third person who would read the proofs, I shall be
much obliged if a name occurs to you that would combine competence
and sufficient leisure, and who cares enough for these subjects and this
presentation of them, or perhaps for my attempts, for it to be decent for
me to propose the trouble to him. Lilley is too busy ; Williams too
dilatory ; M. D. P. too unwell ; Bremond too rapid and scrappy ; G.
probably too little versed, really, in these things and too little strong.
Would Mrs. Dowson accept ?

The Encycl. Brit, people have returned me my Loisy Paper, for me
to add a section on his last books. This is right, as regards the under-
taking ; but means one more responsible, difficult job on top of so many
others, the 3 Rinnovamento Papers, and the Hibbert thing, as well
as the Book. I have been letting the situation simmer in my mind,
especially in my poor prayers, and I now see quietly and plainly that I
must do the reasonably courageous thing, and that this thing certainly
means signing in full the H.J. review, and probably putting the
" H " initial to the Rinn. papers. As to the latter, I incline however

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 149

to putting nothing to the first two articles (which would have " to be
continued" at their ends), and then to sign the third and last with " H."
In this way nothing would be said that could conceal the authorship, and
the authorship would be, practically, announced with the completion of
the study. I hope that this will seem to you sufficiently courageous ;
if not, I shall be grateful if you will frankly tell me. I imagine, from
the way he writes, that Alfieri would be fully satisfied.

As to Loisy's Quelques Lettres, the little volume is certainly
austerely, poignantly sincere. It seems to me that the finest things in
it are at least as fine as anything he has ever written. I began by being
somewhat ashamed and sorry that he should print those two letters
about my little trouble. I had given him permission to print just exactly
whatever he liked, but had begged him not to secure my knowledge
and assent to his selection. And I had forgotten his original offer, but
which had never been accepted, to publish these letters. However, it
is probably well that they should be here. After all, it is he, not I,
who publishes them ; they appear at a time when there is not only
honour, but risk too, in being praised by him j and, above all, the
letters show an affection and zeal for others,- and help to impart a
somewhat needed variety and generosity to the collection. But I
cannot help still wishing much that he had never written those letters,
on that subject, to Roussel : surely they will, in that world, simply
scare and shock. Having written them, he could hardly, I suppose,
not now publish them, if he issued a volume of recent letters at all.
But I shall try and get him to withdraw these letters from subsequent
editions, if such come, and to replace them by others on other subjects
to other people. No one now could say that he had shirked the publi-
cation of those letters. Montefiore also, though full of admiration of
most of the letters, thinks these Roussel epistles a blot and a pity. .
I must say that I myself am not satisfied concerning two of his general,
philosophical positions here. I don't like on pp. 78, 79, the apparent
identification of ethics and religion. I feel sure that Windelband,
Troeltsch, Simmel, Taylor, have got hold of the truth when they find,
in various ways and degrees, that such identification is a violation of the
testimony of religious history ; that it comes largely from Kant having
been curiously slightly religious ; and that it but represents a most
understandable, yet an impoverishing reaction against abuses, excesses
and difficulties of the metaphysical systems in the past and present.
And I don't like that sort of amma-mundi position, with the individual
consciousnesses simply temporal discriminations of the One Conscious-
ness, and with spirit and matter, at bottom, the same thing, and this
without any conviction as to the latter being secondary to the former.
I have told him that to me the " Grand Individu" idea, which is clearly
his, as it is Hebert's nightmare, seems to me, compared with that,

150 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

a venial error, at least if he will not commit himself to the, surely,
most reasonable affirmation, that our having to treat the ultimate and
deepest Reality as though it were Intelligence, Will, Spirit, springs not only
from our subjective wants, but also from the actual nature of that Reality
being, in ways and degrees unpicturable, Inconceivable by us, not less than
all that we find ourselves thus forced to attribute to It. I am often now
saddened at the thought that, not from fear or worldly meanness, but from
sheer obligation to be faithful to my poor lights, I may be forced, before
I have finished my little life-work, to discriminate myself from him,
precisely in these deepest matters, and which I fear he is increasingly
inclined to take up next. Anyhow, I need say little or nothing about
them in Art. II ; but I fear in Art. Ill I must say a little.

I have now also carefully read your very pregnant and penetrating
article in The Home and Foreign Review. I now see plainly how
you came to bring in the Vatican Council, and that you could hardly
avoid doing so. I deeply admire the way in which you contrast Lord
Acton's, Frohschammer's, and then your own view ; also your criticism
of Lord A.'s attitude towards philosophy and Dogmatic definitions.
The whole is admirably courageous, clear, and most difficult for the
others to tackle. A small point : but ought one not to quote that
saving clause, in the decree as to the universal and direct episcopate
of the Pope, that affirms the apostolic authority, of non-delegational
kind, appertaining to the bishops ? I know well that this is practically
denied by the Roman policy ; and that it is probably, if the other, the
direct Papal authority conception be pressed (and Rome presses it),
hopelessly out of place in this system. Yet, even so, would it not be
well to use this saving clause against the rest ? And if it shows that the
defining bishops did recognise other rights besides the Pope's, ought
they not to be given the credit of this ? But this is, evidently, a com-
paratively small point, compared with the many admirably incontro-
vertible and more important positions of the Paper. Many grateful
thanks, then, for it.

Lilley has had a charming letter from the Revd. Newman Smith,
of the Congregational Church, Newhaven, Conn., U.S.A., who, some
twenty years ago, I think, wrote a very good "Christian Ethics" for the
International Theological Library to which belongs Driver's Introduction
to the Literature of the O.T. Well, N.S. has become enthusiastic for our
cause, says he is going to devote the remainder of his life to it ; has just
published a book "Coming Catholicism and Going Protestantism";
and wants us all to keep him in touch with what we are doing. So let
us make a note as to this man.

I have just had interesting letters from Eucken and Troeltsch :
Eucken telling me that, alas, alas, the (Munich) Allgememe Zeltung has
ceased to exist, and that he feels the blow greatly, having now no paper

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 151

in which he can, at any time, write on our great subjects. And
Troeltsch, with his ever bracing breadth and depth of outlook and
conviction, which never, in him, prevent his seeing things, passing
events or permanent antinomies, with an even brutal clearness, writes :
" Ohne eine grosse Revolution ist, fur mein Gefiihl, keine Umkehr von
der Kurialistischen Bahn hier moglich . . . was werden soil, ist mir
heute unklarer als je ; und ich begniige mich damit, wenigstens fur
die eigene Person und die Nachstehenden, einen religiosen Boden
unter den Fiissen zu haben. . . . Sehe jeder wo er bleibe ; und lasse
er sich seinen religiosen Besitz nicht ausreden, und lasse er sich durch
die politische Religion nicht irre machen. . . . Im ubrigen hat Gott
das Weltregiment ; und die grossen ethischen und religiosen Wahr-
heiten der Menschheit konnen nicht untergehen. Besonders interes-
sant sind mir alle Ausserungen von Loisy und Tyrrell." " Mit tiefster
Sympathie gedenke ich all der hochherzigen Kampfer in Ihrer Kirche.
Es ist gut, dass die Gemeinschaft des Xtus-geistes iiber die verschiedenen
Kirchen hiniiberreicht. Schliesslich ist meine Lage in kleiner Kirche
auch nicht sehr viel besser, und mein Herz ist oft sehr gedriickt." He
cannot come to England this year, sends me the first two of a long
series of articles on Christianity and the Social Question : the growth
of the latter within the former.

I have asked Stauffer to send you those sayings of Goethe : please
keep the little book, as one of those poor little tokens of an ever wakeful
gratitude and affection. A very peaceful, at least interiorly peaceful,
Easter to you, dear, much-effecting, much-tried Friend. So glad
Laberthonniere is coming to you. Kindest regards to him and to
Abbe Bremond. So grieved that M. D. P. has still trouble with her
poor arm. What suffering that brave woman has had ! I must try
and be worthy of her and of you all.

Affectionate old Friend,

F. v. H.

I hear your rectification as to L., in Giornale d'ltalia, was admirably
generous and effective : have not seen it. Scotti writes very bravely
from Egypt.

To Father Tyrrell

June 23, 1908.

My very dear Friend, I should consider it an impertinence, were
I to sit down and " answer " your most kind and important letter now
at once. It demands and shall receive a full week's slow rumination,
as a most valuable appeal to me to grow and modify myself. And I
want to do my poor best, and the said best ever moves slowly when at

152 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

all. So just now I want simply to thank you, very gratefully, for so
kindly speaking out, and giving me a better chance of self-improvement.

There are two points only in the matter which I see so quietly and
in all my better moods that I at least am not likely, I think, to see
better and further about them.

I feel sure, in those moments, that not all that, even when earnest,
I live and work for, can possibly be finally true and completely right :
that a good deal of what I love with all I am will have to die, for good
and all, in me as truly as in anyone. And again that what will survive,
will have to do so, just as an element in a larger whole, larger than I
can see and after which I grope and which, please God, should englobe
and put me in some little point and part of the great whole.

And then I feel sure too that, somehow, ever two things and not
simply one have to be attended to : that not only bigotry but also
indifference is to be fought and daily overcome. And I must, very
simply, confess that if such and such people stand out, in my soul, as
illustrations of the former, such and such others stand out in it as
examples of the latter. And I notice that all these latter treat good
faith, search for the light, self-renouncement, etc., as things ' of course,'
things universal, and lightly, rather irritatedly, to be assumed as operative
all round. Now I know well that there is no enclosure within which
there flourishes that full (i.e. ever operative, ever renewed) good faith,
and outside which it does not exist. I merely mean that I have, for
myself and in trying to help others, to guard against the ' of course '
business. I find it as impoverishing here, as in Science and Criticism
is the assumption of the ease of accuracy : the latter is destructive of the
alone fully fruitful disposition for scientific work.

Neither of these my points is in answer to anything you say. It is
but a thinking aloud to you, dearest of Friends, and as a little help
to myself. . . .

To Father Tyrrell 1

June 27, 1908.

My dearest Friend, This too has nothing to do with your impor-
tant letter. It is only to say (for whatever the thing may be worth),
how persistently, through all my varying moods, there is, somehow,
(entirely unsuggested by anyone) a feeling of discomfort and appre-
hension in my old mind concerning your forthcoming book. 2 And I
see quite plainly that this is in nowise because of the mere fact of its

1 This is in answer to a letter of TyrrelTs in which he says : " I sometimes wonder
whether you are not driven to value complexity for its own sake."

2 Published under title of Medievalism, an answer to a Pastoral of Cardinal
Mercier.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 153

being an answer to a man in his position, or from any doubt that per-
sonally I shall learn lots and lots from it. It is simply, I do believe,
the sense that, very really, the other side are beginning to discover the
immense difficulties of their position, and the wish that (without our
ceasing to act and write, and plainly too) we should not keep prodding
them too directly and continually, nor move on to further points before
they have somewhat digested the earlier ones. And then, as to yourself
in particular, I ever feel that (brilliant as are your controversial, pole-
mical hits) God has made you for something deeper and greater, and
that not there, but in mystical intuition, love, position, do you give and
get your full, most real self. So I am most glad that if somehow you
must have one more directly polemical work, you are keeping it back
for leisurely and repeated revision. Of course, even so I feel a bit sad
over it ; for it can hardly fail to strengthen that quite secondary habit
of polemics, and to create a fresh situation and additional occasion for
a repetition of this class of literature. How glad I shall be if, when,
you get out of this kind on to Bergson and still more the great book on
fundamental dispositions.

I have just asked Picard to send me Bergson's Le Rire, partly
because I thought you might like to read it just now. That and
Le Reve are, I think, the only minor writings of his that he has
not incorporated in his three books. Also, you might wish to read some
Plotinus and Berkeley again. Of course, Friend of friends, all my
editions, translations, etc., would be at your disposal.

Well, this scribble wants no kind of answer. We meet on Tuesday,
4 P.M.

Your affectionate

FR. v. H.

To Father Tyrrell

Sept. 15, 1908.

My dearest Friend, Home since late on Saturday night, and at
once engulfed in mountains of papers and unavoidable scribblings.
So this must be only a string of disjointed memoranda. . . .

I found that I simply could not go to that reception, small as its
implications would legitimately have been ; nor have I even signed my
name at Archbishop's House in the Legate's book. I have done and
will do nothing, so that if they do try and utilise this Eucharistic Congress
" demonstration " as a sanction for the vigilance policy or for their line
with you, Bartoli, etc., I shall have my conscience entirely free, and
will not be implicated in even the looth degree or part. My con-
science has felt at peace ever since I decided to stay on at Haslemere till

154 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

after that reception ; and then, as a further point, determined to leave
even such a signature alone.

I saw what there was of a procession on Sunday from the flat roof
of a house on the other side of Victoria Street ; and I marvelled at our
people's appetites, that they should not have been satisfied with what
the Government allowed and did for them, since Victoria Street was
rendered practically impassable for some three hours ; the police, under
my eyes, had such hard work to keep the crowd from breaking through,
that I saw one poor "bobby" carried off, seriously hurt; and the
Legate's giving of Benediction from the three Balconies of the Cathedral
lasted, I should say, some 20 minutes, during which time the side
streets and the square were turned into a Church protected and guarded
by hundreds of police. But it is, of course, true that the Government
shilly-shallied badly, and ought to have made up its mind weeks ago,
and ought not, when it did climb down, have tried to make Archb.
Bourne do the climbing down for them. But I have already come
across several priests, the Carmelite Provincial here is one, who show
plainly how relieved they are that the other Procession was stopped, and
how amply satisfied they are with things as they actually stand in England.
May the " tetes montees " amongst us be got to drop their effervescence !

I also enclose the Prospectus of Die Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, because I shall want you (on returning it when you come)
to tell me if they have written to you also, for details as to your life, works,
etc. I am sure it is but a slip, if they have not ; since they evidently
want to give notices of all the more important " Modernists," and you
can see from Hollhow high they place you. Note, please, that they have
got quite a large number of Catholic contributors. "Epur si muove" :
even this persecution is not preventing things from moving on, even
though we (and I included) often see no change at all !

Have not yet read your paper in the last Nova et Fetera, or even
Bonajuti's letter to you. But some Puck seems to be playing at a
Comedy of Errors somehow and to some extent among our ranks. For
there is B. implying that Semeria is planning quite revolutionary acts,
whereas S. now writes to me (evidently with perfect sincerity and
openness) as to how profoundly he is persuaded, from observations and
experiences of a first-hand kind, that the revolution worked for by B.'s
full adherents is impracticable, or, rather, would turn out disastrously ;
whereas the evolution laboured for by Rinnovamento, however
difficult, remains possible and would be profoundly fruitful. And I
have had a communication from an admirer of yours abroad who is
anxious that you should continue along the splendid lines of " Medie-
valism," so resonantly Catholic and evolutional still, and (if possible)
more than ever ! I think you must have been writing to someone or
other in a mood which was taken as abiding or ultimate. See the

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 155

disadvantage of being a lucid, vivid writer ! / require Analytical
Tables, or my gestures, before I become understandable, and hence
impressive at all ; whereas you are understood (sometimes, perhaps,
misunderstood) before the words are out of your pen. . . .

Friend of friends ! I have been feeling, somehow, more than
ever full of you, grateful for, and at one with you, these last few days !
And it is such a deep consolation to me to find page upon page of my book
given up to very respectful learning from or discussion with you. This
consoles me for my not having any special mention of you in the Preface.
But I am putting M. D. P. in there.

Very affectionate old Friend,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

Autumn, 1908.

My dear brave Maude Petre, Rather than wait on and on till 1
can write as I ought to do, I will seize time by the forelock and at least
give you a tiny sign of life, and of grateful respect, sympathy, and
admiration. Fr. T. has told me of your most wise, tactful and plucky
jousts, especially at the G.'s. I feel very sure that if you can keep
on this kind of most difficult combination of qualities and actions, you
are as sure to win (in the moderate but solid degree at which anything
does win here below), even if, which God forbid, still acuter troubles
and trials were to arise. I am deeply consoled by Alfieri's and Soragna's
letters the latter came yesterday. For it is quite evident that just
this kind of respectful firmness, this quiet, tough holding out, this
fighting, when pushed to it, but with the flat of the sword, this willingness
to seem to fail and to please no one, hardly, for a good long while, is now
succeeding visibly. Their writers, subscribers, etc., are returning, the
Authorities seem unwilling to molest them further, and (chief point)
they have so re-organised themselves and have so firmly fixed their
plans and wills, that they can feel confident of continuing on and on,
even if the Authorities did again come down on them. I hope they
have written to you ; but Alfieri has had to take a post (to live) as
Stockbroker, which occupies 4 hours a day. If I get free at all will
propose myself down, for at least a day or night.

Your affectionate Friend,

F. v. H.

To Professor Clement Webb

Nov. 27, 1908.

Ever since last March right up to about a week ago, I have been so
continuously engrossed in productive work of my own (chiefly, but not

156 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

solely, my book), that, alas, numerous books and Papers which I was
itching, longing, to read, had to be put by till more leisurely times had
come. Even my summer holiday was reduced to one short week ;
and the Sundays have found me so worn that sleep, and open-air strolling
about, and light literature were all, with Church, that I have been fit for.
But now (tho' another, pressing, literary undertaking is dogging my
steps) I have been able slowly to read and digest your most admirable Pan-
Anglican Congress Paper. Its two central positions, all sincere, really
experienced religion comes from God, is " revelation," and only if we
admit this can we claim any special gifts and position for Christianity
(bravo, bravissimo !) ; and, no nucleus of hard fact, of undiscussible
truth : appeal to me, down to the ground, I should like to copy out,
or at least to refer in detail, to one most helpful, happily worded passage
after the other, but have not the time to do so. I think I sent a copy
to M. Loisy ; or perhaps you did ? If not, I will and must send him
one, now, for the Paper will be fresh 20 years hence still, and M. L.
will be most pleased with your reference to him, especially as coming
from a High Churchman. Thank you then, in his, in Tyrrell's names
as well as in my own way and degree, you can easily note, how full
these are.

And now that my book is appearing, to-morrow or Monday, I
believe (my ist, advance, copy reached me on Wednesday), I am realising,
more than ever, how few as yet are, or at least seem to be, the men who
combine those 3 fundamental convictions : the special gift and position
of Christianity, and institutional, Cath.-Christianity ; all religion, in so
far as sincere and experienced " revealed " ; and no hard nucleus : as
you do ; and yet how those thick (far too thick) volumes of mine can
have no chance of even rough comprehension and fair-play with anyone
who has not something of that triad of convictions in him. And this
makes me wonder (I hope without any indecent "log-rolling" !)
whether you would not be able and willing to notice the volumes some-
where, say the Journal of Theol. Studies, or the Hibbert Journal, or,
indeed, wherever else you chose. I cannot help thinking that you
would find much to your liking in those 800 pages, in which the copious
Index helps one about pretty easily, I hope. And, really, in the British
Isles I only know, besides some dozen of the modern-minded among
my own people, yourself, Pringle-Pattison and (in a minor degree, I
think) Percy Gardner, together with, as yet, some very few of your
clerics, of whom I can feel this.

With cordial thanks and sympathy,

Yours sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 157

To Father Tyrrell

Saturday, Jan. 9, 1909.

My dearest Friend, Look here, there is a very kind thing that you
could do by me, the possibility of this has only just turned up.

My wife has been engaged, for some time now, to go to a cousin of
hers, on Tuesday next, i2th, for a week. But I thought that I was
keeping Hildegard. Now H. is invited to some balls in the country, and
I have made her accept from Monday to Saturday next. Yet both
wife and H. are a bit worried at leaving me here, quite alone.

Could and would you come and stay here, during those days ? If
you could arrive for lunch on Tuesday, my wife could still see you, and
personally thank you for coming. And if you could stay till Saturday
afternoon, that would cover all my loneliness.

I need not say that, if you were so kind as to come, you would have
the little downstairs sitting-room, or the big drawing room, all to yourself,
to see whomsoever you might have, or care, to see ; that you would
have G.'s good large bedroom ; and that I would quite understand if
you had to be away most of the day. I myself, too, would have to be
very busy. But, if you were free, we could, besides meals and the
evening, be together for the afternoon walk. And I would specially
like to show you, and to consult you about, my finally cleared up critical
points for my Rinn. Art. No. 3, and to hear from you about the L.S.S.R.
Paper's positions.

I feel it such a pleasant opening, that just when I had to miss being
with you at St., you may be able to come to me here at K. My wife
and H. both want me, once more, to make it abundantly clear to you,
how much they like your coming and staying here, and how entirely
they would enjoy being here with you. And though there is just a
little in the difficulty about some of their very " black " acquaintances,
that difficulty simply does not exist when they are away, and for my
friends and acquaintances.

Do please say " yes," if even only for part of that, alas, very short
time.

Affectionate Friend,

F. v. H.

Some interesting things to show and tell.

To Professor Clement Webb

Mar. 20, 1909.

. . . Alas, Influenza came, and interrupted me, up to to-day. And
even now I am, though up and out again, so weak and stupid that I cannot

158 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

hope to say anything very much to the purpose, in answer to your
interesting letter. Let me, however, thank you sincerely for it, and
for your kind words about that Paper of mine ; and let me try and group
under a succession of headings certain points that are clear to me, or
that I am groping after, in that difficult matter of the " inexhaustibleness
and uniqueness of Christ." I shall say, I am sure, little or nothing that
you do not know at least as well as I know it. But to speak out to men
one trusts, and who have both faith and criticism, is a great help to
oneself. So here goes !

(i) You will have noticed that Criticism, if it has made some of the
difficulties clear beyond recall, has also eliminated others. I think there
are four quite certain such eliminations, and that a fifth matter of a
difficult kind has been rendered very uncertain.

(i) Our Lord's appeal to the parallel of Jonah, was of the most
general and sober kind, and was actually pointed against any search after
a physical miracle ; the " three days and three nights in the whale's
belly " (Matt. xii. 40) is a later amplification that misses the special
point of the situation, (ii) Our Lord never made that strange limita-
tion to His condemnation of divorce (Matt. v. 32 ; xix. 9). (ni) Our
Lord never uttered that strange doctrine, as to the esoteric character of
the Parabolic teaching, deliberately intended to help on the blindness of
the Jews (Mark iv. 1 1, 12). (iv) And Our Lord never treated the Jews
as His enemies, indeed, when denouncing the Pharisees, He did not do
so, whilst the guest of a Pharisee (Luke xi. 37~xii. i). (v) And, at
least possibly, the claim to descent from David was declined, and not
made by Him.

I was distressed to find that Gore fought hard against the critical
conclusion (ii), and Sanday laboured his best (or worst) against the
conclusion (iii). As though both these conclusions were not a great
gain for anyone who realises the ideal standard maintained, to the very
death, by Our Lord. Conclusion (iv) I feel to be even more important;
all the exceedingly painful intolerance of one strain within the Fourth
Gospel goes thus, for good and all, as far as Our Lord's own teaching
is concerned.

(2) I take the difficulties that have been confirmed, in part even
discovered, by Criticism to be four.

(i) Our Lord's attitude towards the question of authorship, historical
character etc. of the O.T. writings, in the many references to them in
His discourses as given in the Synoptists, after elimination of the above
cases, (ii) His attitude in matters of Demonology. (iii) His teachings
as to Eternal Punishment (Johannes Weiss and others have quite failed,
I think, in their attempts to show the Synoptist passages that give these
teachings to be secondary), (iv) His conception and inculcation of His
Parousia as proximate. One could add to the list as at least possible

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 159

the non-foreseeing of, or the slow and late growth of belief in, His
Passion.

I take (i) to be grave, only for one who would be determined to hold
Christ's infallibility in any and every religious matter, even where such
matter would not be of any spiritual importance. For one cannot find any
directly spiritual importance in the acceptance or denial of such literary
and historical " facts." (ii) is grave, I think, in so far as that attitude
has demonstrably given the highest of all Christian sanctions to some of
the most cruel and tenacious superstitions that have devastated Xtendom
and retarded the care of the mentally afflicted for, say, some five centuries
or more. But this difficulty is not grave, if (putting again aside the
question of Our Lord's inerrancy) we ask what was the effect of this
belief upon Our Lord's own spirituality ? For this belief can be shown,
I think, to be with Him purely ministerial to certain abidingly great
spiritual convictions, the reality of sin, the need of continual watch-
fulness, the weakness of man, the need of grace etc. ; or, again, simply
to classify the sufferers whom He wished to help, and actually helped and
cured, differently from the manner in which we have now to classify
them. I mean that, repulsive as is necessarily to us now the conviction
that this or that person is diabolically possessed, and difficult as it is for
us to understand how anyone could believe in innocent possessedness :
yet this latter view was certainly held by Our Lord, and this view
prevents His attitude in the whole matter from being, if I may say so,
morally or spiritually offensive. These possessed persons are, according
to this view, not necessarily bad, not morally or spiritually wicked at all.
This leaves the view more strange (to our present-day feeling) than ever ;
but it deprives the position of what would make it incompatible with a
high and sensitive ethic and spirituality, (iii) I take to insist (even
though with figures that have led to much materialisation and excess of
the doctrine) upon a truth much overlooked or denied nowadays, but
a truth that will remain. I have done what I could for it in my
Mystical Element. And (iv) I take also to express a deep and abiding,
right orientation of first-hand and specific spirituality, which, quite
clearly, tends, in proportion to its depth and purity, to conceive all sub
specie aeternitatis, and, in as much as time is still considered, to apprehend
such time as at hand and instantaneous. If Our Lord did not know the
date of His Second Coming (and this ignorance He tells us was with
Him), then, religious genius that He was, He was bound, as such, to
conceive it as proximate and swift as lightning (I have printed something
about this ; but anonymously, more or less).

(3) You will say : "This is all very well ; but what about His
mexhaustibleness, His uniqueness ? " I think our answer will have to
consist in an increased discrimination between the religious sense and
even the moral instinct, and in showing, if we can, and I think that

160 VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS

we really can do so, that Our Lord had this sense in the supremest
degree known to us anywhere. It is this religious sense which lights
up His world, and it is a world which, apart from that still living light,
is in great part as dead as is the moon. A light as live as is the sun's illu-
minating a world as dead as is the moon : this is an exaggerated image
of what I believe to be the case here. I believe that light, those spiritual
instincts, those general affinities and maxims of Jesus to be truly inex-
haustible ; certainly they have not only leavened Western humanity
for well-nigh two centuries, but I do not see any symptoms of decay
about them. After all, here again we find a supreme exemplification
of the law obtaining in all religions, of the condition indeed of all
characteristically human life and dignity : the truth, even if it be
religious truth, has to express and clothe itself in certain contingencies
of space and time, and, in doing so, it gains strength for a period, at the
cost of weakness when other places and times have to be wooed and
won. But then Christianity appears supreme also, and especially, in that
it makes such condescension the very centre of its faith and Welt-
anschauung, I used to feel, in my own small way, so vividly when
training my three children in religion, how I was ever placed before
the dilemma either of keeping the religion vague, in hopes of their
giving it the concrete application, each according to her age, character
and wants, and then I did not rouse or move them, because I myself
was not moved ; or of giving the religion full colour and concretion,
when I could indeed throw all my own conviction and feeling into it,
but then they would soon come to see it as something from which, more
or less, to discriminate themselves, and to treat it as their father's
peculiarity. Now I should like this law, for surely, it is nothing less,
to get well worked out into full explicitness and clearness, and for Our
Lord to appear as having fulfilled this law with the greatest complete-
ness ; and for us to learn thus the specific, pathetic dignity of the human
lot. He will, by such methods, be revealed as not extensively, but as
intensively inexhaustible, since the truths and laws He showed and lived
for us with especial profundity and power are themselves inexhaustible
and can and do combine with every conceivable growth and trial of man,
giving them their fullest fruitfulness.

I am not going even to read this over, or I shall tear it up. It is
quite unworthy of the subject, but I do not want to keep you waiting any
longer. I am much looking forward to coming on Tuesday and to speak-
ing on your interesting Paper. But this will, alas, have to depend upon
whether to-morrow and Monday are kind to me, and allow me to shake
off the remains of this attack. If I do not turn up, you will know
that it is with very sincere regret that I do not come.

Yours very sincerely,

FR, v. HUGEL.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 161

To Miss Maude Petre

March 26, 1909.

It was an excellent idea of yours, so kindly to write and tell me
what you have been and are doing. And you are ever so vigorous, that
what you feel to be a fallow time would really be a fully active time for
the average of people.

Your letter came and cheered me up, just when this Influenza,
that has now been hanging about me, off and on, for about three weeks,
had got me into fairly great depression of spirits. It is, at such times,
especially, so cheering to realise how persevering, active and (sometimes)
visibly successful are those who will the same difficult combination of
things that one is working for oneself. I am much impressed with the
way in which your fine and costing perseverance is evidently telling
in the Storrington affair ; and you are clearly right to follow up the
matter. When once I have really shaken off this bout (it has come on
again, owing to my getting out too soon), and if then I am free from
duties here, I should like to come to you for a few nights, since I know
your kind welcome there.

You are indeed right, as to the excellence of the last Rtnnovamento.
And you can take a very appreciable part of the credit for the success
of this important undertaking. For I felt when urging those young
fellows on, at a time when they were depressed, that had I been unable
to refer also to you, as one ready to help by pen and purse and as ever
keenly alive to the really unique importance of their persevering, they
would, very likely, have missed from my pressing words the note of being
supported on my part, and they would hardly have listened. . . .

But I have now studied every word of " Ci sono due Modernismi ? "
in that number, and am indeed DELIGHTED with it. One is, of course,
sorry that there should exist this difference and (especially since Nova
et Vetera has ceased to exist) I would myself (at this distance from
the persons chiefly concerned) have hesitated to speak out those things
in public. But in themselves those things are, surely, most true, most
central, sadly overlookable, actually, pretty often overlooked. And
especially the writer of the letter puts the matter with a splendid clearness
and power. But the editorial comments (Alfieri ?) are also excellent,
I will, in writing, say all this to A., the good, devoted soul. You will
have noted how well they have twice discriminated Fr. T. (and Crespi)
from the current they disapprove of; they might have added in your
name too, but you only came in, in the last number of " N. et V."

So glad your Nietzsche is with Constable. I hope much that he will
take it. If he does not, I am sure it will not be from doubt as to the
value of the book, which is too much a work of love and of first-hand
study and convictions to be other than thoroughly alive and very valuable.

M

1 62 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Thekla was professed yesterday, having been accepted finally, on
her birthday (23 years old), the 1 3th inst. She is radiantly happy, and
I am grateful and contented with the upshot. I feel sure as to the
reality and normality, and the importance of that kind of Prayer and
the general form of that life. And the apparent exclusiveness, the
seeming absorption in just it alone, are probably simply appearances, or
realities only to the degree in which the necessary sub-division of labour,
especially when this is new to a soul, renders such exclusiveness neces-
sary. You see that I ever feel this great fundamental truth that the
final measure is the totality of holy lives and calls, the Kingdom of God,
in which even the highest or most costing calls are but necessary
constituents.

Yours most sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Father Tyrrell

April 19, 1909,

. . . The remains of Flu, or at least its after effects are still, off and
on, upon me ; and hence I am weak and have to dodge and adjourn all
longer doings as much as possible. This, in explanation of my long
delay in giving you an account of my stewardship. But there are also
other matters to tell about, so I will number my points, and take them
in chronological order.

I . C came all right, indeed he stayed a long time, and I found

him exactly as you had described him. I was so pleased too, at being
able, quite spontaneously and by using my own judgment on his case,
to advise him along the lines you had already suggested to him. I
admitted indeed that I did think the spiritual instincts, ideals, and helps
to be found in the R.C. Church to be, at their best, the deepest and
finest to be found anywhere ; but I pictured to him, as vividly as I could,
the grave, in part terrible, counter-facts and tendencies to be found in
the same body, and how little the average would be likely to understand
and help him there. But, above all, I insisted strenuously upon how he
should not let his mind dwell upon securing, at any price, the greatest
helps towards perfection, but should, on the contrary, directly aim only
at making the best of his situation, and not think of leaving it short of
plain and peremptory admonitions of his own conscience that, in thus
remaining, he was committing positive and grievous sin. That as long
as he strove thus, with all his heart and with ever increasing prayer
and dependence upon God's grace, he would gain, even where he would
seem to be losing. And that this would not involve the not profiting
by our best books, and such help as he might feel drawn to seek from

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 163

spiritual but unproselytising Catholics. I lent him the two vols. of
Fenelon's Spiritual Letters, and Grou's Manuel. I was sorry to find
that he knows not one word of French, even for reading purposes.

As to those Anglican Benedictines, I was much less definite ; but
I suggested that he could hardly move too slowly in such matters ; and
that I considered him to be one of those very simple, most eager souls
that had still, and perhaps for a long time, to be learning the mysterious
yet very certain truth that we can actually hamper our advance by
trying too directly, too vehemently, too much by absolute recipes or
models, for it. A very pure, simple, spiritual soul. I said nothing about
seeing him again, thinking it better that the possible little difficulty which
his shyness might have in proposing it should test any velleite to see me
again. But I shall, of course, be at his disposal. And I have told you
all the above, in case he should ask you about seeing me again.

2. I got John Morley's Essay on Turgot, one of the many, many
things I owe you. It is indeed a fine, lucid piece of writing, so manly
in its balance and restrained enthusiasm for T. But how strongly one
feels, in that volume, how much, in spite of considerable insight into
their unjust reactions, he, J. M., is a man of the 1 8th century, or at least
a sort of John Stuart Mill, before Mill's later softening. McTaggart
and Houtin, so different again, are also that kind of mind.

To Professor Clement Webb

June it, 1909.

... As to my visit to Oxford, it was all but uniformly successful.
I so particularly enjoyed my little time with you, that most picturesque
house, with its copious waters and remarkable dryness, and my pleasant,
profitable talks with you two. I may perhaps be allowed, without
impertinence, to say how instantly I felt the charm of your wife. She
belongs, surely, to those rare people as to whose simple frankness and
generous humanity there can be no question in anyone's mind who has
conversed with her for even five minutes ; and the humour and common-
sense play about those deeper qualities with a delightful copiousness.
It will be partly owing to the fact that I had (not in Oxford) been meeting
with some priggish ladies, -that your wife's complete freedom from such
distressing faults refreshed me so greatly.

My wife would, I know, be much pleased, if when Mrs. Webb is
in town, she would come and call here or ought my wife to call upon
her ? The best of all would be if you both of you turned up here,
we do not leave for our holiday till Aug. ist, and will be back again by
September I5th.

I felt myself to have been very bold, to have gone amongst them,

1 64 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

when, at Pusey House, I found an assemblage of some 15-20 men to
whom I was asked to speak about Modernist matters, and the majority
certainly but little trained in such questions, and committed, more or
less, to the other side. But Mr. Coles was kindly in tone, and ended
by agreeing to discriminations which certainly he had not allowed at
first. Mr. Cartwright and some two or three others were evidently
with me, from the first.

I much liked my little time alongside of Dr. Stout at Corpus. He
was so genuinely modest about his own books, so pleased with the very
sincere praise I gave them, and so full of admiration for our common
friend, Professor James Ward. But the frail-looking, deaf little man
fought hard and fiercely, I heard, against J. A. Smith soon after. I
had, too, a pleasant time with Dr. Estlin Carpenter, with Percy Gardner,
and with Mrs. Edward Caird, the latter so much come out of her shell
since her husband's death, I find. J. A. Smith, on the Monday, was
very interesting and vigorous at Balliol. Schiller was polite and cordial,
in intention throughout ; but he would persist in paradoxical fireworks,
and ever shirked, with me at least, coming to the great questions and
a perfectly serious discussion of them.

As to pain in the animal world, I am so very glad you feel the
mystery of it, as keenly as I do. After that Synthetic Society meeting
Dr. Caldecott came away with me, and tried what seems to me not
the right way of escape, the arguing that animals suffer little. We do
not know this ; in the case of the higher animals indeed everything seems
to indicate that this is not true, for such animals might suffer less than
man, and yet suffer a great deal. Your two considerations are, on the
contrary, to my mind thoroughly sound and helpful, as far as they go.
Yet you yourself feel (and I feel the same) that they merely tell us
(though this is a solid something), the first, how that our very finding
of a mystery here, indicates that Love is the supreme reality in the
world, and the second, how that it is where we know pain from within,
that we find a certain good in it, whereas where we know not how to
find this good, we do not know the quality or quantity of the pain.
The two considerations, taken together thus, bid us trust on, in spite
of the mystery ; they in no degree directly solve it. I can never find
anything further, that is both sober and that tackles the mystery itself.
The following position would certainly solve the mystery, assuming
Temple's general position to be a sufficient explanation of Evil in
general ; but then the position, to be at all explicitated, leads promptly
to the kind of fantasticalness which only an Oliver Lodge or a
MacTaggart (minds so different, yet both so much attracted to whimsical
details) would venture to elaborate. If we could assume that a spiritual
principle is indeed at work, and never dies, from the simplest plant-cell,
on, through the lower to the higher animals, to man ; and that this

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 165

spiritual principle, soul, is thus gradually evolved with a view to its
attaining, at the human point of development, to the use of free-will,
responsibility, and the power of turning its pains to its own purification
and the constitution of its own character and true personality : then,
indeed, we would have, not precisely an explanation why this, eventually
human soul, had to suffer at its pre-moral stages, but yet an indication
that those stages of apparently non-utilisable suffering were not that
soul's entire existence. Nor do I see why such a view need involve a
transmigration of souls, or an endless round of re-incarnation of already
fully human souls. For the " transmigration " here would not be of
an already human soul from plant, through animal, to man, still less any
" transmigration " back from man to animal and plant ; but an earlier
plant-stage would lead to an animal-stage and this to a human stage,
and never back again. And once arrived at the human stage, the soul
would have come to the point for which it was originally intended,
and now its sufferings, etc., could all be utilised ; and there are certainly
arguments in favour of bringing the soul's development thus far, which
would not hold for this, now human, soul's re-incarnation.

I do wish you could and would attend TyrrelPs Paper at the Oxford
Philos-Society to-morrow. I hope and believe that it will be very good.
But even if it turned out not so, it would be a useful thing, I am sure,
if you could manage to be there. I so much want him to get the sym-
pathy (and, where the need may be, the respectful criticism) of philo-
sophers like you. S. does not, I know, attract you ; and other personal
matters, that I know not of, may make your attendance difficult or
disagreeable. I only want to bear my testimony, based (as far as T.
goes) upon first-hand knowledge, to the good work you might be able
to do, certainly the pleasure you would give, by going.

Yours very sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To Edmund Gardner

Storrington : July 17, 1909.

You will, I know, have been most sincerely grieved at our brave
and brilliant, deep and tender Friend, Fr. TyrrelPs going. It was to
me a great blow, when, on the loth, I was telegraphed for to come
here at once, especially when, on turning up in the evening, I found
him unable to make himself understood. . . .

I now think that this fundamental physical ruin largely accounts
for the violence which sometimes somewhat marred the force of his work,
and for the extraordinary recklessness which marked much of his
correspondence, both as to what he wrote and as to the persons whom
he selected for such outpourings. His Irish blood counts also, of course,

1 66 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

for very much in this. We must be prepared for one or other of these
correspondents revealing some of these letters : yet anyone who knew
him knows beforehand that his letters were almost entirely effusions of
moods vivid but shifting.

What a great mind, pure, tender heart, strong will, suffering life,
soul full of faith and hope ! May God help us to learn, on and on, from
him ! He so deeply appreciated you ; we so often talked of you ; you
never vexed or jarred him, and ever refreshed and braced him. Come,
please, to the Funeral if you possibly can.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Downside Abbey : Sept. 7, 1909.

My dear Newsom, .Thank you, most cordially, for your letter,
with its trust and finely loyal dealing : I feel greatly honoured by its
receipt. I am only sorry to have received it so late, .forwarded here,
yesterday ; and that, away from almost all my books, papers and notes,
I cannot be as precise as I should like to be in answering your important
queries.

1. As to things for you to read, of or about Fr. Tyrrell, I have
none in my mind that you do not know already. But I would point
out that, among all his published Papers, there is nothing to which
he himself (in numerous confidential conversations) attached greater
importance than "Theology and Devotion" (reprinted in The Faith
of the Millions Vol. I, I think], and "From God or from Men?"
in Scylla and Charybdis. Indeed, he used to say that in the first of
these he found, looking back, the root and substance of all he had striven
and suffered for. And the two papers, taken together, seem to me to
give us, in the finest form attained to by him, the nucleus of his teachings,
a nucleus that will abide. And to these two papers I would, myself,
add : "The Prospect of Reunion" (reprinted in The Faith of the
Millions .Vol. II, I think), as containing the very soul of what, later on,
he developed sometimes with vehemence and indeed some bitterness.
I love these three Papers through and through. And among Papers
about him, the most suggestive so far is, I think, Mr. Osborne's in the
Church Times, about July 22-26. An old devoted friend, his school-
fellow, speaks here. I cannot feel O.'s glow of joy over the Ritualist
group ; yet O. is a fine, large mind and a gentle, soaring soul.

2. As to points that I would like to see you bear in mind. The
following three discriminations seem to me entirely within the compass
of the most loyal Anglican. Indeed, I feel that you would be ignoring
facts or violating indisputable evidence did you not, whilst underlining
(almost as much as you like) one member of any one of these three pairs

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 167

of contrasts, say also some definite, emphatic words as to the other ;
twin member.

(1) The troubles of T., as of all " Modernists" came from two
sources, not from one. By all means point out, underline as much as
you like, the morally offensive, the insincere and cruel methods and
temper of mind of Ultramontanism, the way in which it has to maintain
one sort of excesses by excesses of another sort. You will be doing
good all round by such an attitude, provided always you have the
loyalty to point out, equally clearly, that " Modernism " is in no sense
an exclusively R.C. trouble ; that the problems which haunted T. and
helped to break his life are besetting every form of traditional, insti-
tutional Christianity ; and that not all the " moderation," " English
spirit," " gentlemanly bearing," " fine Oxford tone and manner," and
all the rest put together, not the via media or any other attitude or
device of this kind, however respectable and useful in its own place
and degree, reach and solve these fundamental problems, thoroughly
common to Canon Sanday and Pope Pius X, Bishop Gore and Cardinal
Merry del Val. I am very clear that, if you can and will, emphasise
both points, you will be entirely truthful and Just ; and that if you
cannot emphasise both, you should not embark upon either. As our
friend Lilley has said so well, " The pressing divisions are no more
vertical, denominational, they are horizontal, interdenominational."
Please, then, to spare this worn grey-beard the reading of some more
unreality : how much of it I have had to bear, from my own people and
from yours !

(2) You can, again, most profitably insist upon his strong, very
strong attrait back to Anglicanism, provided that, in pointing this out,
as having possessed him during the last six months or so of 1908, you
add that this almost irresistible fascination left him by the end of the
year, and that conversations, letters, documents, his book about to appear
now, are all there to show that the last six months of his life saw him fully
re-established in his resolution to keep on within the R.C. Church.
Mr. Fawkes has written in the Guardian to the opposite effect ; but
Mr. F. himself, unless he has become as hopeless a special pleader as
many of the men he, F., has got on the brain, will have to modify his
diagnosis of T.'s last frame of mind, in the light of the documents which
I have been able to study at my leisure, and which F. does not know.
T.'s book, as you will see, is throughout a vindication of a liberal
Catholicism, which is certainly being hunted down by Rome, but which,
as certainly, is distinct, not only from official Anglicanism or Continental
Protestantism of various kinds, but also from Liberal Protestantism at
home and abroad.

(3) My difficulty in writing about T. at all, all round and as a man,
will be that, if to be a saint is to be generous and heroic, to spend yourself

1 68 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

for conscience and for souls, then T. is a saint ; but that, if to be a saint
is to be faultless, to be free from resentment, bitterness, and excessive
reactions against excesses of your opponents, then T. is a considerable
sinner. Especially do I find these blots in his intercourse with Bp.
Matthew. I dare not pretend that I think T. in all this acted purely
from conscience. The two highly irascible vindictive Celts, for some-
time, egged on each other in firebrand courses. Rome, there too, must
bear a large part of the blame. And yet, two blacks do not make one
white.

Yours most cordially,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

Cambridge : Sept. 14, 1909.

I have again many important documents and reflections to thank
you for. . . .

I. Your question as to whether you should not refer, with thanks, to
my help in getting Fr. T.'s book ready for the Press, in your Introduction
to the book, 1 struck me, at first sight, to be one that in most elementary
courage and courtesy required to be answered in the affirmative. But
then came the reflection that your own right, indeed duty, to publish
such a book, one got ready, signed and dated by himself, not many days
before his death, is inexpugnable, whereas my appearing here at all may,
instead of helping on the cause, simply add to their irritation, as showing
a continuance of plotting, etc. Anyhow, Mr. Bishop so strongly im-
pressed me, during those days, with his experience, wisdom, and union
of ideas with us, that I thought I had better ask him, describing once
more the book, the state in which Fr. T. left it, and your Preface, and
stating, as well as I knew how, the pros and cons for my appearing
leaning distinctly to the pros. (One thing that E. Bishop made more
plain to me at Downside than I had perhaps ever seen it, is the great
duty we have, not because of our comforts or even of our individual
spiritual safety, but because of the truths and the future we stand for, to
avoid expulsion or even condemnation, as far as ever elementary honesty
and loyalty permit, since, uncondemned, it is pretty well impossible to
draw limits to all that we may be allowed and blessed by Providence to
do for souls and for the Church ; whereas, condemned, we are at once
greatly hampered or neutralised, in our work amongst what, are the
majority of Christians and the kind of Christians we have been born of.
It is then not necessarily cowardice or trimming, but may come from
the deepest, wisest love of souls, if we look well around us before each
step, if we plant our feet, very deliberately and slowly, alternately on the

1 Christianity at the Cross Roads, published by M. D. Petre after Fr. Tyrrell's death.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 169

stepping-stones, between and around which roars a raging, deep, drowning
stream.) I have just received the enclosed letter from him. I now
feel as though (unless you, after considering his remarks, see clearly and
strongly that I ought to appear) I had better not be mentioned. Certainly
E.B. has nothing in his life to warp his judgment in the matter, and his
reasoning strikes me as cogent. I am, in a very real way, sorry for his
advice, since I feel a bit of a meanster not to appear.

2. Pray note carefully what he says about your Introduction. You
will readily understand, I hope, that I had no thought of consulting him
about that. The reason why I described it at all, was that he might
clearly understand my case, and the question of my appearing there.
Yet now he has thus raised the point of this Introduction in itself, I
trust you will ruminate the matter. As you know, I began by thinking
that the book might appear with only Fr. T.'s own Preface ; and
though I have come to see that you cannot well avoid saying something,
and though, in addition, I consider your Introduction admirable in
itself (once given that more than an Editor's dry Prefatory Note is
really necessary), I must admit to feeling clearly the cogency of what
Mr. B. says. I feel too as though, at this crisis, we shall do so wisely,
by, each time that hesitation is not excluded by dubious reasons, ever
deciding rather for the few words than the many, for saying perhaps too
little than perhaps too much. After all, it will be a very great point
gained if you and I remain uncensured, or without their attempting to
get us to subscribe to Lamentabili and Pascendi, with the alternative of
suspension from the Sacraments. I know that we must not shrink
from doing all that may be quite obvious to our consciences, whatever
the risks (but, short of such cases, we shall, won't we, very largely mark
time, and when we do act, act with an almost provocative reticence.
There is nothing of gush, etc., about your Introduction, hence the
above is not intended as any criticism of it, however indirect).

3- I am so glad you have given me the opportunity of correcting
an impression I have given you. / have not hesitated one moment as to
the wisdom and strict necessity of your first letter to The Times ; and I am
proud and grateful to have been allowed to share some of the responsibility
for it. All that has occurred since, the very troubles that it has, not
caused, but occasioned, have but shown that we might as well have
burnt all our friend's books with our own hands, as not to have spoken
when and as we did. Amen. No ; I was thinking of a substantially
different point, one that only accidentally was mixed up with that
other point at all. For a moment, when we had got that letter ready,
I thought whether we might not postpone its publication till after the
funeral. The hesitation lasted not many minutes ; and I have long
come to see with quite final clearness that such a postponement would
have been disastrous. Nevertheless my hesitation came from an insight

i yo VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

which I was, at the moment, surprised to find you quite without, the
full conviction that the publication of the letter meant grave trouble over
the funeral. The act was worth that price ; yet it was strange to see you
cheerfully incredulous of any real danger of such consequences. And
your letter to the American Priest also shows how entirely without such
misgivings you were. I have, repeatedly, in other cases also, noted this
peculiarity of yours. It is, plainly, no sort of moral want, indeed pro-
ceeds rather, doubtless, from certain noble qualities. And it evidently
helps you to act promptly and fully according to your best lights. Yet
the shocks and disappointments must be greater for one like yourself,
Friend, than for one like me. And it is, I think, well to draw your
attention strongly to this deeply ingrained characteristic, since, if it
gives you great advantages in questions of conscience, it handicaps you
in questions of prudence.

To Mrs. Drew

Sept. 25, 1909.

I was much interested in the account of St. Deiniol's Library, and
I would have replied sooner, with thanks, to your note and enclosure,
had I not been away from home and the copies of my book, till a few
days ago.

I have to-day sent you a copy of the book for the Library, and I
hope that, now and then, it may there find a reader who will not boggle,
for long or for good and all, at the Germanisms and excessive compression
of the style, and whatever may be the other, more serious defects or
incompletenesses of the book. Long, grateful intercourse and sympathy
with souls of a rare depth and delicacy of faith and love must, I think,
have given some abiding substance to some of these many pages.

The reviews in periodicals are only now beginning to appear. But
some of the weeklies and even dailies have been very encouraging,
notably the Nation, Guardian, Church Times, and Glasgow Herald.

Although only just back from a six weeks' holiday, I am going off,
with Mary, to Harrogate, to see whether a week in that special air
cannot help me more rapidly over a nervous weakness and brain-fag that
are pursuing me now, very tryingly.

She would send her love did she know I was writing.

Yours very sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Professor Clement Wett

Oct. i, 1909.

You must please forgive me for being so very long in thanking you
for your last, kind and most useful, letter and post-card. I suppose it

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 171

is the cumulative effect of the anxieties that have weighed upon me ever
since 1902, and that have gone increasing ever since, perhaps also, in
part, some over-walking that I was tempted into at Malvern by my
revived interest in my. first love, Geology, 'that have reduced me,
these last three weeks and more, to a state of brain-fag and nervous
debility, such as I have not known for the last twenty-five years. Loud
buzzings in my ears attack me promptly, even after writing a fairly easy
letter. So the Doctor warns me to drift about a bit, unless I want to
break down for quite a long time.

I was and am most grateful to you for the careful, and evidently
most exact, list of Errata you have kindly sent me. I am copying
them into my own copy of the book, in addition to various slips now
discovered by myself. I had a very careful professional " reader " and
a most attentive and experienced friend, to help me in reading the proofs;
but I have long ago found, to my shame, that many printer's and author's
errors have, all the same, remained uncorrected.

As to your review of the book, I have no doubt that it will be just
and indeed kind, and that I shall be able to learn much from it. I must
not, of course, expect it to be enthusiastic, even if I believed the book far
more complete and penetrating than I ever think it is. For English
estimates of all work, at least all estimates that spring from English
University men who keep in full touch with English University life,
have ever got, to my personal feeling, a strangely chilling, damping
effect ; it is always as though even a strongly repressed but present and
operative enthusiasm, were a thing to be heartily ashamed of, as pertaining
to Quakers, Wesleyans, Germans, etc. Yet, surely, this is, perhaps a
nationally conditioned and respectable, yet still an affectation. For if
it is not enthusiasm, and enthusiastic sympathy, of course only for what
we see to be true and fruitful, that make men grow and that advance
all things, I should like to be told what is ? But these mighty reflections
are not occasioned, primarily at least, by any treatment I have ever
received, but simply from observing the attitude of the world I am
thinking of, towards scholars quite independent of myself. Yet, I
dare say, the whole thing is only skin-deep ; for how just and active
Oxford scholars have been towards Loisy! Possibly it is simply the
Scotchman and the German in me who, each with his own little way,
do not readily chime in with that other little way. . . .

To Miss Maude Petre

Oct. 15, 1909.

I had intended at once to thank you for my very useful, most
pleasant and refreshing days with you. But I came home only to find
three letters which announced to me about the most distressing thing

172 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

that still remained unaccomplished for the cause we love so much.
And this has required difficult letters to be written, and much further
interior commotion to be borne with and clarified. But first, about
lesser, directly business matters. . . .

The blow that has fallen so heavily upon me is Rinnovamento.
When Casati took over the sole Editorship he wrote me the strongest
possible self-commitments to continue without a thought of cessation,
and that, with our help, he had the financial wherewithal to hold out,
even without a rise in the subscribers' numbers, for full four years longer.
And his letter of a week ago, which I read to you, in no way alarmed me,
indeed it seemed everywhere to presuppose the entirely solid determina-
tion to continue. Alas, alas, on getting back here, I found the enclosed
letters from Casati, Casati's mother, and Crespi. It took me a good
twenty-four hours to recover from the mental dizziness caused by the
blow. And then I wrote to C. with a respectful message to his mother
I told him that, since he formally begged me not to try and modify his
determination, I would not do so. But that I must do two, closely
interconnected, things. I must thank him for all his generous work,
and his large financial support, given without stint or hope of a return,
to the Review from the first, and must tell him that we all shall ever
feel as grateful for this his doing up to now, as though we had been
able to add a similarly deep gratitude for his continuing on and on.
And I must express, not my blame or criticism, for the work has, from
the first, been one of signal devotedness, of real heroism, but still my
deep, piercing grief at the cessation thus of the only really independent
solidly scientific Catholic organ that remained to us, and of the one
institution that, by its very existence, proved the possibility of a dignified,
thoroughly Catholic limitation and thwarting of Curialist Absolutism.
That, even in the midst of Fr. T.'s going, the solid persistence of Rinn.
had, not of course, directly consoled me in and for that irreparable loss,
but still had left me feeling that a centre of work, a beacon-light remained,
capable of eventual expansion. And now this too has gone ! . . .

Yours m. sincerely,

FR. VON HUGEL.

To Mr. Malcolm Quin

Nov. 17, 1909.

Dear Sir, It is truly distressing to me to realise how long ago
you were so kind as to send me your Aids to JVorship and Notes on
a Progressive Catholicism. But indeed I can hardly blame myself.
For, during some ten weeks now, my nerve and brain-force have been
painfully low and threatening to break down ; and yet I have had
fresh, very special, anxieties and work forced upon me by circumstances,

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 173

and which would not brook delay. The last four weeks especially have
been absorbed in the preparations for, and the writing of, a paper on
Father Tyrrell, which, to the non-R.C. reader, will probably appear
simple enough in matter, though somewhat crabbed in style, yet which
for one within, and determined to remain within, the Roman Church,
meant, under the present regime, the achieving, as well as may be, the
most difficult combination of qualities. The thing is to appear in the
January Hibbert Journal ; I hope to be allowed to strengthen it, in the
proof. And two other matters of great importance to our work and
objects have also required prompt attention during these last trying
weeks.

Now pray let me explain that I have, nevertheless, most attentively
read all the Preface and Introduction to Aids to Worship, and the
whole of the Notes on a Progressive Catholicism. I have done so with
the greatest interest, and with a delightfully general, and often the
profoundest, agreement. I shall take care to recommend these remark-
able, admirably lucid and powerful, writings, wherever I think they are
likely to meet with understanding and sufficient sympathy. In the
Aids, I was specially interested in the autobiographical piece (pp. ii-iv) ;
delighted with your early and continuous catholic bias (vi, xii, etc.) ;
the truly admirable statement of the religious alternatives (i 18)
so refreshingly non-sectarian ; the conclusion as to the incompleteness
and the stages of self-improvement traceable in Comte's work (22, 23) ;
the very striking summing up of the constructive principles of A. C.
(27-29) ; the interesting paragraph about Comte, Christ, and the
Catholic Church (32, 34) ; the instructive account of the causes that
kept back C.'s religious development, and of the steps taken by him back
or on towards religion (36-40) ; and above all, the eloquent appeal to
Catholicism fully to develop its own essential presuppositions of true
universality and comprehensiveness (4149). All these passages have
been carefully marked, sometimes annotated ; thank you for them,
again and again.

In the Notes on a Progressive Catholicism, I have admired, p. 3,
" amidst our religious doubts . . . experts " ; p. 1 1 (" The failures of
faith ... to trust us ") admirable indeed ! the beautiful pages on Faith
in Jesus Christ and in Catholicism (14-19) ; the fine contrast between
Judaism and Catholicism, 20-21 ; the admirable admiration for all
the truth and goodness in the non-Christian religions, 22-24 5 ^e touch-
ing piece as to the clearness of righteousness, 25, 26 ; and about going
to Catholicism, and distinguishing in it the evil, present there, by means
of the specific goodness that is more than simply present there, that
keeps the organism alive and ever reconstitutes that organism's law and
standard.

Now if I may (as one who now for 40 years has tried to live such

174 VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS

a spiritual Catholicism) make my criticisms, I find that there are two
great difficulties, possibly not great upon paper how weary one grows
of paper ! but in living and experiencing life and its special obstacles.
i. You appeal with A. C., to righteousness, to the hunger for moral
perfection, as the easy, true, way to religion, and Catholicism, and this
as though there were an identity between morality and religion. I should
answer ; " for propaedeutic purposes, yes ; intrinsically, no." I feel
confident that the two are not, at bottom, the same thing, nor even differ-
ent stages of the same thing. And further it appears to me that it is the
insistence upon some such identity which gives Comtism (in spite of its
intellectual breadth, fine moral fervour, and its touching reverence for
Catholic forms of religion) a (to my feeling) curiously heavy, opaque,
doctrinaire " feel " and tone, when it is simply itself and talks religion.
Religion, I feel more and more, is (in contrast with Ethics) essentially
concerned with what already is and most speedily will be, and with what
is indeed environing and penetrating man ever on and on, but yet as
super-human, other than simply human, as truly transcendent, and not
only immanent. I think that A. C. Taylor in his Problem of
Conduct, and others have recently brought into striking prominence
this "Ir-ness" of Religion, as against the " Ought-ness" of morals.
And certainly I have noted, more and more, how distinct, how rarely
developed part passu, are the religious intuition and the moral sense.
A whole procession of figures is passing before my mental vision at the
moment possessed of keen ethical sense, and with little or no religious
instinct ; and then, a much smaller set of souls, aglow with the specific
religious sense, and having little or no specially moral awakeness. And
hence I cannot but think that a religion without God, does not corre-
spond to the specific religious sense, because no amount of Oughtnesses
can be made to take the place of one Is-ness.

2. Then there is a grave difficulty as to the working out of the
Catholic idea of authority. As you know, the centralising, absolu-
tising of authority has now got to a pitch, tending to destroy authority's
own raison d'etre, and to paralyse, instead of stimulating, the powers of
the soul. But I think that this development is exceedingly difficult
to check from the logical standpoint, or again from the point of view that
seems to have dominated Comte. Was there not much, very much, of
that appeal to an external authority, against revolution, that primarily
political instinct which brought M. Brunetiere to Roman Catholicism,
and which, surely, tends to lock us up within an iron ring and steel
chain-armour ? There is, to my instinct, a connection between this
peculiarity in C. and the one discussed before j and I take it that the
possession or development of a strong specifically religious sense would
have saved both Comte and Brunetiere from this, I think, dangerous
tendency.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 175

You will, perhaps, have noticed in the papers recently, certain letters
of our friend Father Tyrrell, showing how much, during some eight
months before the last four months of his life, he sympathised with and
encouraged the Old Catholics. I am very confident that any special
attrait he may have felt for that body, would not have lasted, indeed that
the last four months brought him back to the ultimate problems and
positions, and to a Liberal Roman Catholicism, whereas the Old
Catholics are neither Liberal nor Roman. But the reason why I bring
up the point is to indicate the extreme difficulty of avoiding the forma-
tion or encouragement of external pressure, by means of separate bodies,
as the only means remaining to check the excesses of an over-centralised
external authority ; except one has and propagates a deeply religious
conception of religion. I feel somehow that, on this now profoundly
important point of the Papacy (yes, but not an absolute one, taking the
place of the other legitimate forces and authorities within and without
the Church) Comte would tend to encourage the evil, or would
certainly not cure it.

Pray, do not take these criticisms as primarily meant for yourself,
for indeed I feel them to apply far more to Comte ; and in any case
believe me,

Yours truly,
F. VON HUGEL.

To J. M. (a Girl at School]

March 23, 1910.

I was so grieved on finding out last Sunday that we had missed your
birthday. Even though, this time a bit late, I am sending you, by this
post, a little birthday present. I have chosen for you BoswelPs Life of
Johnson, in the best smallish-sized one-volume edition now on the
market, because, though parts of it are dull (so are parts of Homer,
Shakespeare, Milton, even of the Bible), it contains, in quite three-fourths
of its bulk, things that have not died and will never die. I hope you
may end by feeling, with me, Johnson to be a true help towards serving
God, towards that inner life without which we are empty and poor
indeed. And so I give you the book, as one more proof of my prayer-
ful trust that it is not with you a silly child's passing whim, a shabby
sentimentality of the "salad" years, but a simple, humble determination,
with God's grace, quietly and wisely, with much breadth and ever
renewed patience, to constitute yourself, on and on, into a spiritual
personality. I feel, somehow, a happy trust that you will never, perma-
nently at least, add the pang, to so many others, of your ending in the
mere drift and fever of the surface, 'faddy, selfish life so near to the
best of us, as long as we are here below.

1 76 VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS

I also want to say, Child, that I should like you to-morrow (Maundy
Thursday) to mind and read those most glorious verses 1-17 of Chapter
13 of St. John's Gospel. I should like you to read and pray over them
very carefully thinking how you are called to wash your neighbours'
feet the feet of those God has specially given you. And on Good
Friday, I should like you to read similarly

Imitation Book III. c. XXVII.
and Book IV. cc. VIII, IX.

I have striven to work that St. John and these Imitation glories
slowly, thoroughly, into my poor man's life. You will similarly strive,
but patiently, sensibly, practically, to work them into yours. Of course,
only prayer and dependence upon God, and a cheerful humility which
will learn how to learn, and be grateful for little buffets and humiliations,
has any chance even of perseverance. To-morrow will be half-way to
the joy of our having you here. It will be with a very shout of joy that
this old Father-thing will welcome you here. And meanwhile careful
work, entering gratefully into everything, School, play, leisure, sleep, etc.,
as if each, as it comes, were the one only thing in the world. Without
such variety, no wholesome growth, religious or otherwise. Oh how
grateful I am to God for this schooling of yours ! How precious are
these months ! Love them, browse among them, bid them, were it
possible, to tarry ! They will found you for life, for love, for the happy
service and growth in and for God and man.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

April 2, 1910.

My dear Bishop Talbot, I did indeed receive your most kind, long
letter from the Persian Gulf ; and I have only waited to know you safe
home, so as to be sure my answer of grateful thanks would not have to
wait or miscarry.

I have, so far, not had more than three or four appreciations which
have encouraged me as much as this one of yours. For you are a man
of wide and long experience in these things, one in a position of much,
deeply deserved influence ; and we are sufficiently independent of each
other for me to be able sincerely to ignore the influence of motives other
than the intrinsic appeal of the book's subject-matter, method and
convictions, determining this your encouraging verdict.

I certainly never expected anyone, least of all a hard-worked Bishop
not of my own Communion, to be taking those two bulky volumes out
with him to India, and reading them en route. And certainly there are
few men indeed whom I would so gladly know to have done this .as

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 177

your honoured self. Of course, I often thought of India, in course
of the Book's composition, were it but for the fact that my Mother's
family has, for generations, furnished very many Anglo-Indian soldiers
and administrators, and that my traveller-Father never wearied telling
us boys of the glamour and mystery of India.

Your various reflections have been, and shall be, much pondered
over ; and if I ever get to a Second Edition, they may help me in my
choice of what specially to retain and strengthen.

The biographical part of the book is now being translated into
Italian ; and, to my surprise but (of course) pleasure, a long, careful,
very appreciative study on the book has just appeared in French, signed
by a French well-known Jesuit, and this has been signalised to my wife,
with much gratification, by another S.J. one of the Theology Pro-
fessors of the English Province. As both these things (these S.J. acts)
have happened two months after my Hibbert Journal article on Fr.
Tyrrell, it seems plain that at least individual members of the Order,
here and there, are left free by their Superiors publicly to speak well
of me.

As to Loisy's fivangiles Synoptiques If it is simply that you
have not had time, but that you like, or do not mind, keeping the copy,
for further even just possible use by yourself or others, then pray keep
the copy. But if it is that you are determined never to read it, or would
not care to be found owning it, then let me have it back, please.

He is having a most interesting, important controversy with (against)
Salomon Reinach, and the latter's very able, but shallow, and systemati-
cally irreligious Orpheus ; and many of the things L. is urging against
R.'s wholesale depreciation of all religion' are, I think, admirable. I
only wish that a distinctly sceptical, purely immanentist current were
not now painfully evident in some parts of L.'s own work, and that we
had not a pretty strong specimen of this current in parts of his article
in yesterday's new Hibbert Journal. But this current still, does not
dominate him, throughout many pages of his writing elsewhere, even
of the last few weeks, and still allows him, evidently with full sincerity
and no conscious want of logic, to defend religion as deeply true and
sacred. May this latter side of him, which can nobly protest that the
grace of God, and grace transmitted by the Sacraments, are in very truth
no mere empty names, maintain itself, indeed grow stronger and stronger
again against that sceptical side, apparent chiefly in his moments of
definition and reflective summing up.

I shall indeed be delighted to meet you again. But you must be
extra busy, so soon after your return ; and I myself am full up till
April 25th. From that day onwards I could, as far as I can foresee,
arrange on most days to come and see you in the afternoon. Or you
might be coming some afternoon in this direction ; and how glad and

N

178 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

honoured would I feel if, in that case, you could and would come into
this study of mine, for tea or coffee, at 5 or so, or any time you would
appoint between 4 and 7.

With repeated warm thanks,

Yours very sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

I have just heard from Dent that the book during the six months up
to Christmas had sold at the rate of a copy every two days.

To Mrs. Drew

April 19, 1910.

Mary handed me the envelope containing her accompanying letter,
quite three days ago. I regret that I was too hard pressed by other
things and too little in a mood of interior leisure to venture, before this
moment, upon adding my little contribution, my expression of deep
respect, regret and sympathy. I had not, as you know, the advantage of
knowing your husband. But his going like this came upon me as a most
real shock and abiding distress. For I well knew how devotedly hard-
working a Christian cleric he was, in times that want such so very badly.
I knew too how true a husband and father he was, and how necessary
to your and your Dorothy's fulness of satisfaction and help. And I
knew him to be so little an old man, so certainly my junior, that it never
crossed my imagination this his going before me, and that / would be
called upon to speak, to write these poor words.

Certainly this latter circumstance, of his having, still, presumably,
so much of life and utility before him, must greatly have added to the
shock and wrench. One can but hope that it may also, in the long run,
bring this alleviation with it, that thus he has been spared any diminution
of his powers. And for us whose creed is so full of the reality and power
of the life invisible and beyond the grave, it should be, I think, in a manner
more congruous for souls to go, from the shadows here, to the realities
there, whilst even to our earthly, bodily eyes these souls are full of
vigour, more nearly like what we believe they will become.

I was so sorry too to read that your Dorothy is not in very good
health. May the fine South African climate, and the sight, at closest
quarters, of her Uncle's great responsibilities and work out there, bring
her back to you entirely strong and very happy.

Yours very sincerely,

FR. v. HUGEL.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 179

To Miss Maude Petre

July 4, 1910.

It was truly good of you to write me so long and kind, indeed so
handsome a letter ; and I know you to be so supremely truthful that
though much of what you say is doubtless the product of your generous
interpretation, yet it is quite sincere and, thank God, not likely to change.
I also take respectful note of your reservations, valuable to me as still
further indicating your perfect sincerity, and which do not, in any way,
lessen the encouragement springing from the letter. I hope that as,
please God, I get better spiritually, I may be able to see more and more
with you even in these, relatively few and minor points ; and meanwhile
I cannot but thank God heartily that, in a world where (as I have been
seeing again lately) it is so rare and difficult to get anything like funda-
mental agreement and encouragement, we should be so deeply, so heartily
at one. And if, also in the other cases I am thinking of, one realises
how good for one's poor soul is this discipline and how entirely dear to
God such souls maybe, and doubtless largely are, not simply in spite of but,
in fact, because of such sincere differences from one's self : how much
more readily can and does one recognise these two facts and principles in
a case where they have practically no scope worth speaking of. You will
have guessed how ill-health of my present sort especially makes me
realise with painful fulness, and probably even exaggerate, the loneliness
of one's special aspirations and apprehensions. Thank you then, very
gratefully.

To the Same

July 16, 1910.

I have indeed not forgotten Fr. T.'s first Anniversary yesterday.
He had a Mass for our, for this intention on Thursday, 1 4th, and my
wife and I both got to Holy Communion for him then. And this
morning I again got to Mass and to Holy Communion for him. We
did this, knowing well that the actual day was yesterday, but we could
not keep away from the Carmelites, on this their and. our Thekla's day,
and yet we could not manage early Church, three days running (having
to come in to-morrow, Sunday). So we had this plan.

How I wish I could have been with you, yesterday, in his room and
by the Grave. I feel a happy confidence that you had the sure con-
sciousness of how deeply my mind and heart were there, with you in
your reverence, gratitude and grief. I also wish you had received at
least this poor note yesterday instead of to-day. But the fact is that
I felt pressed in my conscience to begin, at least to try and begin,
my regular work again. And though I have managed these, its early

i8o VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

stages of special readings and extracts, I have done so feeling all the time
that I was using up every scrap of available energy, and finding myself
unable (besides my ever refreshing though tiring Sandow Exercises) to
do more than crawl from bench to bench in Kensington Gardens, and
requiring again a large amount of dozings in my darkened study. And
I felt that the railway and drive to you would very likely knock me up
again badly ; and even the writing of this little letter felt, alas, impossible
yesterday, when the bare time for it turned up. How quickly, in one
sense, the year has passed ; and how additionally rare and precious his
deep, delicate, massive sense of and witness to Religion, the reality of
God and of the World Unseen, appears now, on looking back. My
very difficult, utterly fundamental subject of study, reflection and prayer
is bringing this much home to me, and I pray at least as much to him as
for him, to him for light and love, gentleness and strength.

Yours ever gratefully and affectionately,

FR. v. HUGEL.

To J. M. (a Girl at School]

Sept. 28, 1910.

You will by now be in the train for High Wycombe. I am very
sure you must be feeling the going back this time a hard and trying
duty something truly disgusting, in various ways. And I want to do
what I can, by this poor letter to help you, in these weeks. I have
several points to put and questions to ask you, with a view to such
help. . . .

1 . You have now these weeks at School, and whether you take them
slackly and ungenerously, or keenly and with a nobly determined heart
there they are. They will have to be got through. And yet I am sure
that if you take them in the latter way looking at all the best sides of the
School, and throwing yourself as fully into them as ever you can .the
time will not only pass quicker, but will pass doing you good ; otherwise
it will pass, yes, but will do you harm ; I now have come to feel that
there is hardly anything more radically mean and deteriorating than, as it
were, sulking through the Inevitable, and just simply counting the hours
till it passes. And I am sure " the Bit " will do her level best against
any such spirit now. Just because she has come away from such
delights and engrossments and will have them again when she gets
away she will try to give In return, something to God, the generous Giver.
And what she will thus give, will be her full, her as full as possible
attention to, and cheerful entering Into, this last of her School life.

2. I quite understand your missing the last half term ; you would
not be able to do yourself full justice over the Exams., which would no

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 181

doubt be additionally difficult ; and the (relative) non-success in a thing
leading directly to nothing, would be depressing and to no purpose.
But here again is a fine opportunity for exercise and growth of the true
spirit of study for you. For, of course, the stimulus of Exams, ought
not to be necessary for securing good work ; indeed the finest, because
deepest, stillest assimilation and penetration, etc., most certainly never
gets done under the pressure of a near Exam. So that absence of Exams,
need not, and will not, prevent your doing good work. And even if the
work were but for one day, it would deserve to be done well.

3. As I have got to know yourself and your family, your circum-
stances better and better, I have come to see how very much in all
three ways makes towards your finding systematic book-learning the
mechanisms (largely inevitable) of it, the sitting still for long, the punctual
and regular recurrence of (indoors) brain-work, etc. difficult and
irksome. And it strikes me as though these coming few weeks at School
will be either checking or actually strengthening this weakness, for all
that is certainly the latter. I do not, of course, mean, as I am sure you
know, that I think the love of the open-air and physical exercise of
Nature etc. a weakness : all this is certainly a strength. But where
these things make the other habits and duties impossible there they
become weaknesses. The ideal for us will certainly ever be to do both
sets of activities, to require them both, and to alternate and harmonise
them a difficult task, but without which you would become either a
sickly pedant or an empty-headed hoyden.

You will become neither if you give both lives some, a proper
amount of loom in your life and not more. The body, the imagination,
reasoning, intuition, taste, heart, will, the religious instinct, how many
things all right, all necessary, to be developed strongly with, and in
rivalry with each other, within the evergrowing, deepened personality.
Now, these weeks, you can practise certain sides of all that especially
well, in some respects for the last time. . . .

To Professor Clement Webb

Oct. 3, 1910.

Please forgive long delay in answering your question as to the
identity of Saintyves. I, too, was long puzzled as to who he could be
and was misled, by a usually well-informed friend, into thinking, for a
short while, that he was Albert Houtin. But this latter mistake was
possible only so long as I had read nothing but S.'s La Reforme
Intellectuelle et Morale du Clerge his best book, I believe. It was
Loisy who explained to me that Saintyves is the nom de plume of Emil
Nourry, the Paris ("Modernist") publisher. E. N. studied for the

1 82 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

priesthood in some (I think the Paris') S. Sulpice Grand Seminaire.
He left, before receiving Major Orders, and without any scandal. He
shows clearly, I think, all the knowledge of the dessous of those circles
and that life, all the ingenious, often acute, intelligence for detailed
facts and unpleasant conclusions, and, alas, the predominant sceptical
purely subj ectivist trend, which, on reacting from an unwise and excessive
" objectivisme," such ex-clerics generally show. He publishes some
really good books, but a good many too dominated by that most under-
standable, yet very regrettable spirit, regrettable, too, in the fact that
it most certainly helps to excuse and bolster up the false " objectivism "
against which it thus revolts.

Thank you very much for your Paper Recent Movements, etc.
I have now already read it twice, most carefully, the second time,
aloud to Angelo Crespi, very competent in such matters. We both
admired it greatly and it will help to prick me on along my poor mountain
climbing affair which progresses sadly and slowly. One more of the
stricken " Modernists " is declaring himself a pure Immanentist. After
Bonajuti and Minocchi, now Murri, cleric as they, is defining God as a
purely abstract term for the totality of humanity's quite immanental
aspirations, and Rome is busy driving out upon the whole j ust those among
my people who most require the support and corrective of an institutional
religious life and atmosphere, without which they promptly succumb to
just the weakest assertions of modern Philosophy.

Thank you especially for the careful discrimination between the
three kinds of " Idealism " ; for your caveat against Rashdall's anti-
mystical, hardly religious, religion ; for your careful guarding against
seeming to admire "Pascendi's" tone and methods, and yet your fine
insistence upon the truth maintained by Scholasticism and lost by the
Reaction (an excellent, absolutely appropriate designation).

To Miss Maude Petre

Nov. 3, 1910.

Thank you so much for kind P.C. I carefully read your " Open
Letter" in yesterday's Times this morning 1 ; also the Leader. I do
not find that your letter has lost anything by the modifications made :
it was, and is, a most dignified, courageous, touching and religious
declaration, and the way in which you just touch upon your own great
troubles and beg for sympathy with the Priests, is deeply moving. I hope
so much that much good may come of it. Even though you are likely,
I fear, to get public and private letters of a disagreeable and violent

1 I have not my own papers by me think it was the letter written when the
Bishop of Southwark first " prohibited " me. M. D. P.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 183

kind, it will be difficult, I take it, for the authorities to go further than
they already have done. For, surely, anything like a formal, public,
nominal Excommunication of you would be felt by themselves as pretty
certain rather to win souls over, more or less, to your way of thinking
than to detach those already with you. I shall, of course, watch
developments with the deepest interest. I have sent the two things to
Mgr. Mignot, and am doing the same to Loisy.

I was glad that The Times added a leader of its own, this assures
your letter not being overlooked. That leader is good in tone and wise
in its insistence on your family, etc. But the writer has evidently not
read the Motu Proprio and, I expect, not Lamentabili, either. And
thus he misses that very telling excess in the former, as to all Papers
and Periodicals being forbidden to seminarists ; and the detailed inter-
ference with all historical research as to Christian Origins, in the latter.

As you know, I ever care so deeply for the Sacraments, for my

friends as much as for myself.

Yet I am very

sure that what you so kindly tell me, is literally true ; and that with
much prayer and great fidelity on your part, God will make up to you,
fully, I pray Him, overflowingly, for that loss so generously incurred
from love of Him and of souls. May God bless you for all your
generosity j and please pray for me that, if and when the trial comes, I
may be most carefully, most fully faithful to my best lights as God may
give them to me.

To Miss Maude Petre

Nov 17, 1910.

My dear Maude Petre, In the midst of my composition-toil I find
myself so drawn away to impressions and thoughts about your most
recent happenings and doings that, even simply, in order to be able more
whole-heartedly to attend to my immediate calls, I want to put these
thoughts and impressions upon paper to you, leaving them just simply,
the scribble done, to your kind interpretation and leisurely attention.

I was so very, very glad at the two main things, as to decisions of
your own, that you had to tell me when we met, that you had aban-
doned, for the present, the Tyrrell Memorial, and that you had got out
of any co-operation with de St.'s Protective Association plan. It is
plain, that both these ideas may some day, and in other hands, become
very valuable ; but the time is not yet for the first, and the methods of,
or congenial to, de St., are certainly not what would solidly help on the
latter.

Altogether it is a very great support and consolation to me, and I
want explicitly to thank you for it, that, on two of the general principles

184 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

of what my conscience and experience tell me, more and more clearly,
must be, for myself, immovable rocks and foundations, you see and act
entirely as I feel I must do myself. These two .principles are : (i) That
it is religious faith and religious, positive, conviction that must be, and
must be kept, our actual and our declared motive and starting point in
all this our work, thus Crespi and I have each, separately, written to
the Cultura Contemporanea promoters, that we will do our level best
for them with writing and money help of our own, and with getting
others to write and give money (I know you have already given money),
on the condition that the Editor (whilst, if he likes, admitting purely
immanentist arguments and pleas) shall ever make it quite plain to the
readers that the Periodical accepts such contributions only with a view to
having all the material before it for ever deepening and widening a wisely
Transcendental, Ontological, i.e. religious conviction. And (2) that just
as we do not allow ourselves to be driven by anyone or anything into the
camp of simple negation or scepticism, but, on the contrary, we watch-
fully work and pray to turn the very stress and strain into so many
occasions of deeper faith and constructive love, so also we do not allow
ourselves to be insincere even against the insincere or to try and build up
the Future upon casuistical echappatoires of the Past. So in your
attitude towards subscription, and our devoted S.'s similar feelings.

/ am very, very grateful to God for such deep arguments.

Yet, just because of these two strong mutual convictions, I feel that
we are additionally bound, at least I feel it plainly for my own case and
very wistfully for yours, not really to weaken (by occasioning easy
embitterments or misunderstandings about) this our double position.
And it is this strong conviction of mine which made me suffer very
really, Friend, when Fr. T., towards the end of his devoted life, did not
mind appearing mixed up in his work with militant " conspirator "
people, with married priests, etc. As to those " conspirators," I know
well how much they have been sinned against, how many, how plausible,
are their excuses ; and as to the married priests, you are aware that I
realise how a fresh study, and doubtless serious reforms, are called for,
of and in the existing rules and laws. Yet it is more plain to me now
even than it was then, that even a very small amount of plain speaking
and straight acting will do more good than mountains of clever, even
heroic " hoisting " of the others " with their own petard " ; and that
the reform of the celibacy question demands very delicate handling, and
that those who have gone and settled it, for their own cases, out-of-hand,
have disqualified themselves for any really useful leadership in the particular
work we have in hand. After all, whatever may be the (doubtless very
mixed) motives why the official world clings so tenaciously to the
status quo particularly on this matter ; however great may be the
practical difficulties of individual priests in the matter ; and however

VON HtTGEb'S LETTERS 185

much we will not judge them nor hunt them down if they go and
marry : the celibacy has stood, and largely stands still, as the main, the
culminating form of self-renouncement to millions of devoted Catholic souls,
and we shall deservedly lose our influence precisely with, and because
of, what is best in such deeply honourable souls, if we let ourselves be
drawn into public association and collaboration with married Priests,
now, and as matters stand. Hence I could not but realise with a pang
that you are being held up to special honour (honour you deeply deserve)
by a Priest's, a Carmelite's, son, this son the editor of the paper,
probably the only French paper that thus praises you. . . . After all
are we free to feel nothing for, to neglect as really negligible, the feelings
of so many souls that have got the presumptive prior claim upon us, and
who feel thus on a point where we ourselves will ever be delicate, reserved,
careful, in proportion to the depth and tenderness of our spirituality, and in
proportion as we remain useful to the best in those primarily given to us by
God?

... I cannot help feeling, after now four days of much additional
thought and prayer, how wise and right, how blessed by God, it would
be if you, Friend, a woman, so spiritual a person, one so much in the
forefront of work and fight, could and would keep your collaboration, your
cordial and comfortable intercourse, free from married priests and their
children, / mean, of course, especially over our work. At all events for
my own conduct I feel plainly that I should lose my interior self-
consistency, peace and self-renouncement were I myself not thus to
abstain.

Yours ever gratefully and affectionately,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

March 13, 1911.

... I thank you much for writing so frankly about your, most under-
standable, shock and trouble. 1 I indeed understand it, if only because
I have experienced it myself, less strongly, somehow, yet very really ;
, and I see so well the reasons, one of which you yourself unfold, why you
should feel the tragic end of him we knew so long, and whom you
especially knew so well, so very intensely.

But besides telling you, just simply, of my deep sympathy with your
grief and trouble, I should like to say a few words on two points con-
nected with this affair.

The first concerns the tragedy in itself, a particularity in such cases
which, I think, you have overlooked; and which, if you do think of the
case (and you do so rightly in dismissing it now as much as possible from

1 The suicide of a friend.

1 86 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

your thoughts), I trust you will ever remember simultaneously with the
more painful features of it you say that doubtless he was out of his
mind at the time ; and you imply that there was not, need not have been,
any moral fault in the act. And I cordially agree. But you evidently
have not considered how insanity would affect a man, not as to his
responsibility, but as to his hold on life, and consequently as to whether
we can argue from his taking his life then, when mad, to the degree of his
suffering as though he were sane. I mean, that if there is a thing which
is certain in insanity, at least of some sorts, it is the extraordinary loosening
of, the (as it were) unconsciousness of, the link of life. I am very certain
that not one-tenth, not one-hundredth of the distress of mind etc. is wanted
to make a man who is insane take his life, which would be wanted to
make him do so when sane. Hence it would certainly be very easy
for you, the sane looker-on, to make yourself more miserable over such
a case (regarded as just so much suffering), than the agent or sufferer
himself experienced. What I have just been saying is a dominant fact
in hysteria cases, and most undoubtedly prevails, at least as truly and as
much, in cases of downright insanity. Pray realise this, Friend ; it is
very certain I think, then, the problem, grave, God knows, though it be,
is not as directly and acutely painful as it (very naturally) presented itself

to you. The problem, I think, is in reality simply why God allowed

to become mad, or indeed anyone to so become ; and why, when they
are so, He does not somehow prevent their impulsions mastering them
to the extent of taking their lives (the latter being still valuable, on
the supposition of their possessors returning to rationality). But the
problem is not why He allows them to suffer so acutely as to be unable
to bear life, clinging, as they do, to life as you and I cling ; it is not
the problem, for they do not thus cling ; they are curiously unaware of
their life as such.

But, my dear, noble, sensitive Maude Petre, do not pray attempt to
realise this, the insane mentality. This is as dangerous for our sanity,
as is the taking the case as though it were one of a sane person dangerous
for our peace of mind ; and in both cases, it is an unwise danger, one
based upon what is not, or upon what is diseased and yet has the power
to infect us, without the slightest good done thereby to anybody, but much
diminution of our power to help others.

My second point is that I note, with yourself, that you are over-
impressionable, doubtless from the accumulation of so much trouble of
all kinds, during these well-nigh two years especially. How I wish that,
for the sake of your very work, you could discover and carry out some
weeks of change and rest just now ! Of course, I am not even indirectly
or remotely thinking of any abandonment or modification of your work ;
but simply of such a little break in, and change from it, as would bring you
back, at least relatively refreshed and rested.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 187

I spent two nights at Cambridge, ten days ago, my first visit there
since over a year ; and I found the little change did me good. I want
so much to come down to the " White Horse " to see you and the
chapel-room and the grave, and to get at least a couple of good talks with
you. But these keen winds are giving me chills and upset thus my work ;
so I must wait a little for this long-hoped-for pleasure and profit. I
should like to come on a Monday morning till Thursday afternoon, or on
a Thursday morning till Saturday afternoon. But I would not, of
course, come when inconvenient to yourself. Perhaps, if the weather
improves, I might be allowed to come next Monday ?

Your ever affectionate old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

To a Lady

May 22, 1911.

. . . As to your two non-Catholic friends . . . my experience and
feeling tell me you are very wise in thus discriminating between the
older, unspeculative, and the younger, speculative lady. It certainly
does appear to me as a vicarious tempting of God to encourage the
submission, or even not to keep back from this step, now, a soul and
mind such as I imagine the younger lady to be. My general rule in
such cases is to do what I can to feed in such souls the true and deep, in
their degree, Catholic instincts and practices that I find in them, either
already active or near to birth, and, whilst warning them (if they show
a velleite to come to Rome) as to the grave practical difficulties for them
on the side of any vigorous and sincere intellectual life, that are now to
be found in the Catholic Church, to let them feel that, nevertheless, in
the Roman Catholic Church resides a depth and tenderness and heroism
of Christian sanctity greater and richer than, as a matter of fact, is to be
found elsewhere. In this way one does, I think, as much good and as
little harm as possible. One feeds and encourages, and yet leaves such
souls to God's ways. For He may call even such souls, and even in
such times ; only I think that such souls, in such times, ought not to be
encouraged to come, unless they felt for long, beyond the possibility of any
honest doubt, that it would be a grave sin against the light for them to
remain where they are.

It is certainly a very real grace given you by God that you should
so plainly see the dangers, and yet should so steadfastly hold the divinity,
of the Catholic and Roman Church.

i-88 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

To J. M.

May 24, 1911.

Of course you could not help writing. But of course too your letter
gave me the biggest consolation you have ever given me. And especially
of course I find I must say some words to you about it. I should like
you to take all I am now going to write as very deliberately meant, as,
I do humbly believe, coming from God, through me unworthy, to
you. . . .

The fact is that the poor thing that scribbles these lines is the work
of religion. I weigh my words, Child : I should not be physically alive
at this moment, I should be, were I alive at all, a corrupt or at least an
incredibly unhappy, violent, bitter, self-occupied destructive soul were
it not for religion for its having come and saved me from myself- it,
and nothing else ; it, in place of everything else, it, in a sense even
against everything else. I know well how many, probably better-
natured people there are in the world who seem never to have felt this ;
I know how many others there are who seem to feel it, but who do not
really, not enough, at least, to determine their lives ; and keenly do I
realise how many, how grave are the problems and difficulties that spring
up with and in religion, and how carefully, patiently, devotedly, they
require to be met aufur et a mesure of their turning up, unless the soul is
to be thrown back. But, I also know beyond argument or a moment's
hesitation, that my experience is absolutely not an eccentric one ; and
that, in the long run and upon the whole, humanity itself realises that it
cannot do without religion, and that even when and where it does not
realise this, it is the less deep, the less tender, the less completely true
without it. But then, as Miss Alice Gardner, in a good talk with me,
once said, when reflecting upon her experiences of religious indifference
among some (but now decreasingly numerous) girls now-a-days, the
difficulty to get people to see the need of religion lies in this, that many
people really have got naturally fairly harmonised " good," I.e. not
violent, not passionate, not neck-or-nothing natures ; and that such
people, if they live in a predominantly non-religious age, can live and
die with little or no religion, without coming to grief in tangibly immoral
ways, or without finding clearly that they are miserable in themselves if
left to their own unaided resources. And the damage of the non-
religion to such souls, she thought, not they themselves, but only very
spiritual people, could see.

Well now, as long as souls are in that condition or of that sort,
religion has, as a matter of fact, no genuine entrance into them ; and
religious friends, those to whom religion is their life, could very easily,
I think, even do harm, for they might, by offering wares for which
there is no conscious wish, simply irritate or strain, by so doing. . . .

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 189

I feel as though you are now getting thoroughly awake, Child, as
though you sincerely long to fight, to drop, to overcome self. Without
that dividing up of the true self against the false, without a fear and
dread of self that will drive you to God and Christ, without a taking in
hand daily, and ever humbly beginning anew, but not in your own strength,
but in a despair of self, which, if true, means an utter trust in God and
Christ, so utterly near you day and night, religion is fine talk, at least
it has not become fully alive ; and without such a life as that, Child,
note what I say you will never be happy, you will become feverish,
bitter, hard, odious, or will shrink into a poor surface-thing although
I doubt whether you could, whether God would let you achieve the latter.

Even now I feel a little fear as if I were somewhat previous with
all this. For are you not only turned 1 8 ? And are you not going to
have a little fun ? And why be so solemn and so serious with but a
child, with but a girl that should be treated slightly, or at least con-
sidered to be a thing that will run through a thousand moods before she
has done, and not as one to be entrusted with the deepest most sacred
truths and trusts given to suffering, toilsome men ? Yet I cannot
believe this, even though one's contrary faith, like every faith of any
worth and use, contains an element of risk, of creative trust that cannot
be proved right before the event. I see you a soul capable of being, oh, so
miserable, so violent, so bitter, fierce, hard, self-destructive. I know
you to be now at years and even months, which will build up in you
either the right or the wrong habits or drifts. And I see, with joy, that
just the necessary, the unique foundation for all those habits is there,
doubtless laid by God. I could, of course, try to help you to find peace,
just simply in your non-combatted self, in the exclusion of- the deeper
promptings of the religious sense. Yet not what you give will make you
suffer, in the long run, but what you keep back ; not the fear and hatred
of self, but all temporising with it. Every self-conquest will mean peace.
Of course I am aiming at no new practices, at nothing you do not already
know well. But these would be the chief points, I think, for your
examination of conscience, for turning over at Spiritual reading, and for
your little silent cries to God, in your recollection, during the day :

(1) dropping quietly all favourable comparison of self with others, indeed
all unnecessary self-occupation, all self-sufficiency, all self-completeness ;

(2) putting in place of all that, love, service, adaptableness, attention to,
occupation with others, ever so much, to the verge of weakness ; and

(3) above all, continuous, infinite, tenderness, devotedness to, trust in,
service of the darling Mother, doing your little seasoning with, and in
fullest union with her, with love, you understand love, Child, love !
Mind, now, no naturalism, no goodness in your own strength. Pretty
rotten rubbish that would be.

God bless you, Child mine. Pray for me.

1 90 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

To Lady Lyall
(on the death of Sir Alfred Lyall)

June 25, 1911.

Dear Lady Lyall, I have myself been indisposed ever since your
most distinguished, deeply regretted Husband went, and even now I am
very little vigorous. And hence I had to send my wife round to your
house to gather some details about his end, the funeral, etc., instead of
being able to come to the house myself. And hence, too, my little letter
to you conies somewhat late.

And yet I should feel that I had deprived myself of one of the
consolations open to us all who had the honour to be his friends, if I
did not dwell for a little, upon paper, on some of the rare gifts and graces
of his rare personality.

I find that two qualities of his ever accompany my memory of him.
And since these qualities were not, I think, obvious to many, and since
also my special circumstances and conditions made me a somewhat
privileged observer and exacting critic in these matters, I think I had
better confine my remarks to these two qualities or gifts of his.

For one thing, then, I found him touchingly, even somewhat
embarrassingly, humble. Here was a man who, in practical admini-
strative work, in study of oriental races and still living ways of thought,
in poetry and belles-lettres, had achieved so much, and was justly accepted
as so high an authority. And this man, in associating with me, was
ever spontaneously occupied with keeping or shifting our conferences
on to subjects or studies, not like those mentioned, where he was
immeasurably my superior, but on to matters where I happened to be
more at home than he was himself, and where he could and did assume
the position of equal give and take or even learner. Even at the time
I felt the nobility of this ; but now, on looking back, it strikes me as
beautiful and truly great.

And the second thing was his faith. I know well that Clerics of
every kind, with but one or two exceptions, ever rubbed him up the wrong
way ; I know that he would sometimes say or even write things that
sounded sceptical or at least agnostic ; and I know that I was not
satisfied with much of his reflective philosophy, his attempt at analysing
his own search for, or his finding and possessing of God. And yet, for
all that, and more of the same kind, his was a spirit that ever hungered
after the Invisible, the Eternal, the Abiding, the Perfect ; that mourned
over the blight of Materialism, and the wandering of so many souls
with apparently no light to aid, to turn them towards the fuller and
fullest life ; and that never really lost the sense of the Reality of God,
and of the irreplaceable greatness of Christ, as the manifestation of God,
and as the salt and balm and tonic of our poor fleeting, feverish little lives.

VON HOGEL'S LETTERS igi

And it is a special consolation to me that precisely our last three or
four meetings brought out this his deep and delicate thirst and faith, more
clearly and emphatically than ever. And indeed the last time I ever
saw him, he expressed with a hotly unforced depth and pathos his wonder
at the way in which the majority of men seemed to live and die, hardly
touched by this sense, which alone makes us fully awake human beings,
of our little finitude touched and keptVestless, and yet also rested, by the
Infinite, by God, our living origin and home.

And all this prevents my feeling as regards him what I have been
unable not to feel with regard to several others, when they died the
incongruousness of the dead person's temper and soul and habitual aims,
as those appeared in their earthly lives, with what we cannot but conceive
must be the world and life beyond. For with him, there truly was that
hungering and thirsting, that seeking, which in the things of the soul,
as of God, is ever in some real degree a finding, a having, a being found
by, God.

With sincerest sympathy and ready promise that I shall never forget
the high honour of your dear Husband's friendship.

Yours most truly,

FR. VON HUGEL.

We are too, of course, so grieved for Miss Sophy.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

July 7, 1911.

It was most kind of you to write and tell me, so soon and so clearly,
as to the impression produced upon your Society by the life and advice
of Abbe Huvelin, and by my attempts at summarising the lessons flowing
therefrom. Some day or other you will, perhaps, explain to me where
exactly your Liverpool non-conformist was dissatisfied or apprehensive.
When I had come away, I regretted not having, when you at the end
asked me to say a few more words, taken the opportunity to say how
grateful I was to your friends for giving me a hearing, for thus letting
me try and put to them, and hence to and for myself once more, what I
had found so fully to stand the test of life. I think it was your kind
wife's explanation at dinner, that not all those who would listen to me
were Anglicans, which stopped me from making that remark. But
perhaps you will kindly utilise such opportunities as may soon occur,
for letting this or that member know how strong was my feeling of
obligation.

Perhaps if I had had time to develop how powerful and constant,
to^my mind, has to be the check and opposition within the complete
spiritual life of the rational and the mystical elements upon and to the

1 92 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

institutional element, your Nonconformist friend (I take it a Baptist)
would have been nearer to sympathising with the really very ample
scheme.

I enclose the names of books asked for, by the tall lady whose
countenance impressed me much and encouraged me, somehow, in my
poor attempt at articulating deep, indeed the deepest, things.

With renewed grateful thanks, also to your wife (happy man you,
to have got her),

Yours most sincerely,

F. VON HUGEL.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Sept. 21, 1911.

Your most kind letter came to me at a moment of great depression,
for Murri had just published an answer to my " Religione ed Illusione "
which is, indeed, most kind towards myself personally, but in which,
deliberately and with the utmost clearness, he abandons all and every
non-human, ontological Transcendence, and plumps solidly for Feuerbach,
at least for F. of the stage combated by me in that article. M. till quite
recently, and largely until this pronouncement, was quite satisfactory,
indeed even scholastically correct, in all these great matters ; and it is
sad to have been, tho' not, I think, at all the cause, yet the occasion of
such a pronouncement. And several other smaller things had been
happening, all more or less in this (depend upon it now dominant)
subjectivist direction.

Thus your careful reading of, and large sympathy with, things I
have been allowed to learn from great, devoted souls, and, even with
points which, in that precise elaboration, I believe to be largely, so far,
special to my own strivings, could not but be doubly welcome, and a
precious incentive to attempt the doing better again. I could not
manage more than ten days stoppage of work, and am now again hard
at it, this time at a paper on " Eternal Life " for Hastings' Encyclo-
pcedia. I was particularly glad that you cared for, and were going to
get Mrs. Newsom to read those final pages on Hell, Purgatory, and
Heaven, for I feel very happily confident that Catharine Fiesca Adorna
would have entirely approved of them. I trust too that, sooner or later,
you may specially like what I have been groping after in the last chapter,
the purgatorial function of severe scientific method and habits, within
the complete life, with regard to religion as, at first and ever readily,
lived by empirical man. Tyrrell considered that I had there got hold
of a fact and principle which have a large future before them. May I,
or others, succeed in making it clearer and more impressive.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 193

To J. M. (a young girl)

Oct. 13, 1911.

I have been longing these days to be writing in answer to you. For

hard work somehow always makes me feel both crushed in my own eyes,
with the keen sense of all one's old limits, miseries, and helplessnesses, and,
and, nevertheless, the darling, glorious, Greatness and Love, the Ever-
lasting Arms that are at the bottom of life, at the bottom even of our
own little lives. And I have been realising, with such happy vividness,
that nothing in my past life, that was worth abiding, has gone, but that
it is either still within me, or, what is better far, held and kept alive by
God elsewhere. And as part of this abiding life, which, please God, will
never go, I saw and see you, my child, who have just simply become part
of my true self, and whom, I feel spontaneously, I must and will cherish
and help to grow as part of that life and soul which God has given me
to live and be in and for Him.

But only to-day has the leisure come, a little break in my con-
centrated work. For dear, sweet, gentle Lady Herbert died quite early
this morning, without a struggle, after 36 hours of unconsciousness.
A great abiding loss for us. I have known her intimately for 39 years :
never once, in all that time, did her courtesy and kindness falter ; never
a week, often not a day, passed but she did me and my three, not to speak
of their Mother, a genuine kindness. And it has been wonderful to
observe how splendid has been the fruit of her long cheerful fidelity to
the best lights that God gave her. ... When, some three months back now,
she suddenly became herself again after Holy Gommunion, she spoke to
Hildegard with a magnificence of faith and love and realisation of God's
reality and presence, which H. repeated to me an hour later, moved to
her depths. And indeed, when I saw the Grandmother, some ten minutes
after she had thus spoken to H., the rambling of mind had indeed come
on again, but the countenance looked still quite youthful, with the air of
spiritual power, a queen von Gottes Gnaden. She told Hillie that she
wanted her to know how fully she, the Grandmother, was realising that
she must die, and that nothing could keep her ; that, in some minutes,
her mind would again be rambling ; that she was utterly in the hands of
God alone ; and, and, that she was overflowingly, blissfully, happy, that
she would not be out of His hands and His will, for anything in the
world. That life was earnest, deep, precious; a struggle, a growth,
a self-donation to God ; that she so trusted H. would more and more
thus give herself and find her true self. And next that there were
God's poor, the small, the obscure, the forsaken ; let her, in loving
God, love those, and, in loving those, love God, with death to self,
on and on. It was more finely said than that ; but that was the
gist of it.

194 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

I tell you, my Blessing, because, do you know, I see more and more
clearly how you (I say you, for we have no responsibilities for others,
and others may be, so often are, very different from ourselves) can never
be happy without religion. And by religion I mean not some vague
sentiment, or some beautiful thought, not even, though this is getting
nearer to it, moral striving as apart from faith in, and realisation of, the
great Spiritual Reality, God, in Whose presence, and as Whose will, we
thus strive to grow and be : but by and in self-donation, such self-
commitment to a, to the Reality other than, yet immensely near to,
ourselves.

I know very well how many things there are in modern life and
influences to make such faith difficult for us all, for me as for you ;
I know, again, that the antecedents, and, in some respects, the environ-
ments of your family also contribute to the difficulty ; and, lastly, in
your own nature and mental habits are things to render it difficult. But
all this has nothing to do with my point, that, difficult or easy, there
alone, yes, alone, is what, if and when you can win it (you have
not got much of it yet), all your very faults and tumults, all your
pains and disappointments, all your surprises and shocks, can and
will contribute to build up a joy fathom-deep, substantial, buoying
up a naturally melancholy, immensely sensitive, easily self-devouring,
self-destructive, nature. We will not strain after this, I will never
push you ; reactions are ever near us, and how dangerous they
are ! You will simply try to keep up, very conscientiously, whatever
part of your religious programme, when in peaceful, untiled dis-
positions, your conscience makes you feel to be your attrait ; and the
rest you will not tilt against, indeed you will ever try and starve all
contrariness in yourself. To do only what, in one's best moments, we
see to be the highest for ourselves, we see to help us most to feel little
in our own eyes, and yet expanded and loving and forgiving, that is
right ; to do anything because it is not something else, or because it
pays out others, or because it is the excess against some contrary excess,
is always weakening. . . .

To Professor Clement Webb

Feb. 13, 1912-

Sooner than wait till I can properly read your very interesting-looking
Inaugural Lecture a thing with Eternal Life still pressing me,-
indeed more than ever now I am finishing it up, I may be some time
before I can sit down to do, I want to write and thank you at once.
Indeed there are two or three points which, I feel, I ought not to delay
to put to you.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 195

For one thing I have read, re-read, and read a third and fourth time,
most carefully, for purposes of that article of mine, a good third (mostly
the last third part) of your book. The article will by its quotations,
estimates, etc., show most plainly how highly I value, how much I have
learnt from it, all the parts about Kant and the Ontological Argument
and the like are truly admirable. Thank you for them, again and
again. I am only sorry that this special (hard !) work of mine, and with
little health to boot (I am now a week in my bedroom with a bronchial
cold on me that will not go !), has prevented me studying that book as
a whole. But this I am looking forward much to doing, when again
free to browse at leisure ; and I will then give you a more detailed account
of my impressions. Meanwhile I feel the book full of good, useful,
courageous things, but not quite so organic a whole as those wonderful
three Papers of yours. Especially did I feel those gleanings from
Marrett etc. as doubtless appropriate, probably necessary, but, for all
that, as somehow hardly fully alive, here. But what a meanster I am
to carp at any part of so helpful, fine a book !

Then I want you to realise that poor winning little Signora Cesare
Foligno is dead. She went, with wonderful serenity and resignation,
after having fought hard to live and not to leave him lonely, on January
29 ; he wrote me this, a few hours after the event. I know that if
that tactful, kindliest of women, your Wife, and you can do anything to
show the poor young fellow your sympathy and friendly helpfulness,
you will do so. I am so sorry for him.

To Professor Clement Webb

April 20, 1912.

Dr. Hastings, after having formally instructed me to make my
article " Eternal Life " as long as I might think appropriate to the import-
ance of the subject-matte r, now finds that my production is hopelessly too
long for his Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. He speaks highly
of the work in itself, but thinks that any curtailing of it would spoil the
thing. As it stands it would, he finds, occupy more than 50 pages,
perhaps up to 60, of the double-column pages of the E.R.E.

He has, then, offered to get T. & T. Clark to publish the thing
promptly, at their own risk and expense, and with a royalty to myself
on every copy sold, as a separate volume, of, I suppose, 250-300 pages.
I have accepted, and I do not doubt that in not many days now the
contract will be signed. I am hoping to get proofs on, or soon after,
April the 2Qth, and to have the book out before all the readers I am
likely to get disperse for the long vacation.

196 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

These, however, are details partly beyond my own control and
uncertain also for this very reason. But that they will publish the book,
and that I shall be at work on the proofs within not many weeks time,
this, I think, is as certain as any such things can be.

Now I wonder whether you would be able and willing to do me a
great service and kindness. I want to secure the services of two scholar
friends, in the reading of the proofs. Edmund Gardner, the very scholarly
R. C., is one, and you the philosophical Anglican are the other. Will you
do me this most kind favour ? You know my weaknesses and peculiarities
well by now, so your help would be comparatively easy to you, and
specially valuable to myself. And I would ask Gardner to keep an eye
especially on R.C. susceptibilities and requirements, and on my style;
and I would beg yourself particularly to watch my philosophy, its
clearness, consistency, and (relative) completeness.

Your book gets largely quoted, backed and highly esteemed in three
separate places ; and indeed, I hope and think the general drift of the
Paper is of a kind which you may well like to help in making more
effective. But I know how busy you are, so I shall quite understand if,
unhappily for myself, you cannot help me. Your name would, of
course, be gratefully recorded in the Preface, as one of my two kind
proof-readers.

To Professor Clement Webb

Sept. 26, 1912.

I am thoroughly ashamed, because of my long silence with regard
to all your kindness and the pleasant, profitable letter you wrote me,
now, alas, many weeks ago. But my poor holiday has gone, in some
respects very pleasantly yet with the grind of work largely semi-
mechanical work such as Index-making never ceasing during the hours
when I would, otherwise, have written my letters. And now that I
have done with concocting the last batch of MS., and have only to wait
for the proofs of the Index, a great lassitude and a thirst for rest from
scribbling is upon me. I have harked back to the Geology of my boy-
hood, I mean to Geology which I so greatly loved in those years, and
which has been a most refreshing off-study to me ever since. I do not
like calling this taste my " hobby," for it was Lyell whose Principles
taught me, not so much the details of Geology as jnethpd, in general
and how strenuous and necessary a thing that is.

But let me thank you at last for many things. For so kindly attend-
ing to my Preface I had no intention that way my instructions to
the Printers had been to send you all, but only, the body of the book.
But I was very grateful for this unlooked-for help. Gardner suffered

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 197

the same fate and was equally kind. The Senior Partner of T. & T.
Clark for some reason woke up suddenly to great activity over this Preface,
and asked for a further, more exacting revision of its English. The
Vicar of West Malvern, his Doctor, and a retired old Winchester Master,
all went through these pages once more for me. And if this composition
is not all right now, it must indeed be suffering from a double dose of
original sin.

I trust the Printers have now properly understood about the Index,
and that you will be no more troubled with it than you were with the
Contents. But if proofs do reach you, pray ignore them. I can do
quite well there, without adding this trouble to your other work.

I have also to thank you most warmly for Scotti's 1 very successful
visit to Oxford. It was truly astonishing to note the number of men,
and interesting men, whom your friend Mr. Benecke managed to get
Scotti to meet thus at the end of August. And both Scotti and I fully
realised that, in the first instance, this was owing to your wise choice
and your zealous influencing of Benecke. Hence, even though very
late, let me say how grateful I am to you for this. S. learnt much during
those hours, I am sure.

And lastly I was so much interested in hearing about your Vacation-
reading. It is always a genuine enlargement of one's own materials,
texts, and outlook to be given thus, by minds one knows well, a direct
account of their further activity and experience. I was, too, very glad,
that you had been studying Jane Harrison a writer who invariably
ends by annoying, sometimes by deeply disgusting, me ; but who has
great knowledge of the details of Greek custom and belief, and whose
(I think profoundly defective or erroneous) attitude in fundamental
principles and interpretation is so symptomatic of still wide tracts of our
present-day thought and instincts. May you some day achieve a careful,
balanced, deeply probing criticism of her, Cornford, Frazer and the like.
As to Frazer, however, I really believe Loisy will carry out a large
part of what we want, and admirably to boot. I am sad over the
most recent Roman official acts : Lagrange's books prohibited in the
Seminaries I think so far only of Italy, on the ground of their infection
with rationalism ; and Semeria turned out of Genoa, indeed Italy, and
relegated to Brussels. Will the Dominicans succeed in preventing
Lagrange's books from going on the Index, and the Barnabites in stop-
ping the same fate for Semeria's works ? We shall see. Anyhow it is
abundantly plain that even now the repression has not passed its zenith
and that there still remain books and individuals whom it has not yet
taken in hand or only in a preliminary fashion.

I am arranging with Leslie Johnston for an Address on the Religious

1 Count Gallarati Scotti, the chief founder of the Rinno*vamento and biographer
of Fogazzaro.

1 98 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Philosophy of Ernst Troeltsch at New College, I hope some time in
March. I loved my little stay with Mrs. Webb and yourself ; but I
expect that this next time it will be more convenient to you if I put up
at New College, as Johnston proposes.

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Lady Ritchie
(on the death of her husband Sir Richmond Ritchie)

Oct. 15, 1912.

My dear Lady Ritchie, It was only yesterday evening that I knew
of your dear, fine Husband's death, or indeed of his being seriously ill.
It was a most real shock. I would so much have liked to honour myself
by going up to-day to Hampstead to join the many who will be honouring
him, first in the Parish Church and then, doubtless, in that pretty
Churchyard where repose our much appreciated George du Maurier
and our loved Mrs. Charles. But I am called away to-morrow to a
friend in trouble, to Brussels ; and, with but little health just now,
I have to nurse myself so as to be fit for the journey one of very
real importance. And thus I dare not go up to Hampstead.

Will you, however, suffer me to dwell here, just a little, upon what
is not a little thing even to us who no doubt had seen but little of him,
especially during these latter years, and a thing so very, very big for
you, his children and grandchildren ?

When, surely, not a year ago, I had the pleasure of at last seeing him
again at our mutual friend's, Mrs. Micholls, I had the rare advantage of
sitting next to him after dinner and of hearing well his genial, humorous,
wise talk. And it has remained entirely fresh in my memory, with the
accompanying vivid realisation of what a fine, unique thing was and is
such a man the ripe fruit of the English Public School, University
and Social and Administrative tradition and life. I could and did at
once compare him with so many distinguished foreign Public Servants
whom I have known so well ; and the superiority, on the generally
human side, struck me, once more, as very great. There was so
absolutely no pedantry, no inflation, no sensitive claimfulness as little
as there was any embitterment or jealousy ; and all this although he
had very certainly mounted high, and equally surely was not without
feelings and human nature.

There was only one thing about him that truly pained me : I felt
that, somehow, this my junior by two years was considerably my senior
physically ; that, though really only in later middle life, there was a
bodily condition there which made him, in these respects, my senior by,

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 199

say, ten years or so. And I cannot help hoping now that I was right,
and that you all realised this condition ; for, if so, then your present
trouble will have come to you all as somewhat less of a shock. And yet
that strong impression of mine did not make the distress less for me when
I suddenly knew that the tall, dignified, able and far-sighted Father of
Hester and of Billie, and the Husband of her who had left us her " Book
of Sibyls " as written in our house, had disappeared from our shifting
earthly life.

My wife bids me say how entirely this letter is hers as well as mine ;
and how deeply we both of us feel for you.

With ever-living memories of the past,

Yours very sincerely,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

Oct. 28, 1912.

I did not get back from Brussels till very late on the night of last
Thursday. Then on Friday I had your kind and interesting letter,
and on Saturday your handsome gift the two volumes of George
Tyrrelfs Autobiography and Life. And now on Monday I write
to thank you most cordially and to report a little on the main points of
my experiences.

But first let me say that of course I am going to read your two
volumes most carefully as though I had never yet read a line of them.
And indeed I read the book in MS. mainly to look out for things im-
provable ; and now I shall read it in print directly only to learn and grow
thereby.

I note already that the chapter " Another Friendship," which
followed upon that concerning myself, has disappeared after all, very
naturally, since H. Bremond has, of course, to be extra careful. And
yet I see with pleasure how the indications of his, H. B.'s, special close-
ness of intimacy with G. T. remain quite crisp throughout the pages
dealing with things or ideas where H. B. came in. I am also very pleased
with the arrangement of the documents, with their relegation to the
Appendix, where they stand indeed printed in their entirety yet in un-
obtrusive, i.e. small print. This is excellent. And then how wise you
have been in securing drawings from the daguerreotype or photograph
portraits : these drawings give the features but with a softening of the
photographs which brings what is thus presented to us really much
nearer to the living countenances aimed at. Altogether, two striking,
distingues volumes.

I hear that a long and most friendly review has now appeared in The

200 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

Times (A. L. Lilley ?) I have this morning ordered Romeike to send
me Press Cuttings of all reviews (i.e. judgments) concerning your book
and mine, the really long ones in two copies. I well understand your
feeling tired by those indifferent, colourless announcements. But let
us, both of us, whatever the reviews may bring of pleasant or unpleasant,
become and remain penetrated with the truth of what Edmund Gardner
once eloquently preached to me as the upshot of his long experience as
a writer and reader of reviews and observer of their effects : books
live or die, in the long run, quite independently of the reviews ; and the
large majority of all reviews are written by incompetent hands and
without even an attentive perusal of the books reviewed. He maintains
that it is only the Publishers who keep up the figment that the average
reviews really matter. In the case of your book there can be no doubt
that it will live, even if here and there with modifications. (Even this
restriction is put in, not because I can lay my finger upon anything
likely to go, but simply because so little of anything we poor humans do
ever does live just as we put it.) But I fervently hope that you may not
have to pay a great price for it, I mean not any general deprivation of
the Sacraments or attempts to exact excessive declarations. I hope this
for you with your book just as I hope for it for myself with mine ; and
this not primarily, I think, from a shrinking from suffering (although
this in moderation is certainly no sin) but, I think, from a realisation,
during these last years especially, of the grave disadvantages and dangers
attendant upon such deprivation. Well, we will pray, watch and wait
and do nothing either aggressive or insincere. Pray for me, please, as
I do daily, and thrice daily for you.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Dec. 7, 1912.

Before I turn finally to other things I want to apologise and, as far
as possible, now to make amends, for what I saw very clearly on my
way home last night to have been the abrupt termination of my little
address to your finely keen young men. I had announced to them that
only the end would really explain the beginning of my address, and vice-
versa and then, when I got near the end, the end never came. It was,
I think, not only the effect of my recent weakness and ill-health (although
I am now largely all right again) ; it was even more the sense, which
grew as I proceeded in my talk, of what a burden and complication I
was laying upon young shoulders. Was it not, then, as well, was it not
better y to seem to be decousu, incomplete, merely suggestive, than to try
to strap the burden clearly and precisely on to their young backs ?

What the logic of my position and my experience of these things

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 201

involves is, however, as follows. Not only is the Church, a Church,
necessary (at least in the long run, upon the whole, indirectly) for a full,
firm, delicate, elastic, wholesome faith in God and in Christ ; but some
such faith in God and in Christ is necessary to the end for such a faith
in the Church. So little is it true that I ought to be simply passive in
the hands of Churchmen, that my adhesion to the Church becomes fully
fruitful and entirely wholesome only if that very faith, which the Church
so largely helps to foster in me, beats strongly back upon and continu-
ously checks, purifies, steadies and sobers this my Church allegiance.
Thus it will be this my deep faith in God which will, e.g., react upon my
trust in the Church as to the documents and the happenings of the N.T.
Thus too it will be my faith in, my living of, Christ which will, e.g.,
react upon the juridical institutions and conceptions more or less neces-
sary to, and inherent in, any institutional Church. And all this check
and countercheck, all this growth through tension, suspense etc. will
be the heroic substitute for the heroic element in, for the attrait of the nobler
ultramontanism. There will here be a most genuine operative assent
to the .Church's quite final self-commitments, there will here too be a
continuous grateful love and use of the support, doctrinal, liturgical, etc.,
for the wear and tear of life, and a grateful concentration upon her
saints and her spiritual life. And that very abstention from any attempt
to force the mind into more from any trying to commit it, entirely
and absolutely, to what the Church authority itself does not solemnly
and finally define ; that, together with the fact that Church authorities
are continuously found to make, more or less, these dangerously excessive
claims : what is, what can all that be, other, for such a concentrated
soul (living so largely by and through such institutions) than one long,
deep, continuous Purgatory ?

There, you have there, but only there the culmination and^the key
to what I said.

Please, as the ever kind, utterly reliable friend you are, either keep
all this for your own consumption only ; or read parts of it to your
young men when again assembled around you ; or finally tell them, in
your own words, of my regret and a little of what I would have said.

Yours very sincerely and gratefully,

F. v. HiiGEL.

I had fixed my eyes, whilst speaking, upon a winning, apple-cheeked,
keen young countenance. I so love youth ; and then I discover, with
pain, that I have put too much upon them !

I am so very, very sorry for you two over this fresh disappointment.
Ah yes : it is, surely, true, deeply true, that we must dive in faith ever
so much below the surface, to find, to love, to will God, and His will,
our life. I was sorry not to have noticed people about when we were
on the street.

202 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

To Miss Maude Petre

July 22, 1913.

It was truly kind of you so promptly to tell me of your Paris doings
and experiences. I never was harassed by any real doubts as to what
you would say there ; my fears were centred upon not your com-
promising yourself further by your going for we have, at times,
deliberately to compromise ourselves, if we would be faithful and fruitful
but upon your further compromising yourself without any solid, or
at least sufficient, return and gain. . . .

I was to have been off to Gertrud at Locarno, a week ago. But my
health won't stand long journeys now. So this morning my wife left
alone, with a maid ; and H. and I go to-morrow afternoon to my dear
widowed sister-in-law at Wilton ; and then to Hindhead. We are all
to be away five weeks. Am looking forward to being near your sister
and her family and to seeing my little god-son. I expect we can count
upon their being at Grayshott for at least part of our three to four weeks
near by.

It was only this morning that a letter from G. made me sure that
your Tyrrell volumes have been put upon the Index. Little as one could
expect, as times go, that this work would escape, one is none the less
sorry that this blow has come. I do not doubt that you will do nothing
in the matter either way as long as nothing is asked of you ; and that
if anything is demanded, you will very carefully consider and weigh
every step before taking it. But I expect that they will ask nothing.

I am, of course, very pleased that you like my Liddon House
Address. Its successor, at the Caxton Hall, before Dean Inge, on
July ist, was spoken to over 200 people mostly (very cultivated)
ladies much the largest audience I have ever addressed. I opened out
with an emphatic protest against Dr. I.'s tone towards my two intimate
friends George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy men to whom we all owed
so much ; men of such rare gifts, mind, scholarship ; men as much,
and more, wills, intentions, hearts, consciences, characters, as intellects
and critics ; men too as live and sensitive as ever could be any one of us.
No difference we might have on any point or procedure with either
of them and I could not, myself, pretend, to be at one with all their
latest positions can obscure those facts. But the Dean is too much an
English gentleman and Christian to resent my frank expression of my
pain.

Yours affectionately,

F. v. HUGEL.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 203

To J. M. Connell

Dec. 31, 1913.

It has been a matter of continuous regret for me, almost throughout
this entire year, that your fine Book of Devotional Readings? and
its kind presentation, should have remained unacknowledged by me,
But I wanted so much to have read a good deal of it first, and this, not
critically and drily, but with sympathy and in a devotional mood ; for,
after all, your book appeals to men in this mood, and ought not to be
judged by them except from out of this mood. And I have been so
hard-worked that, for this kind of reading, I can only find my usual
quarter of an hour, which has to go to those few books (Bible, and
Imitation, and Confessions) which have been my staple spiritual food
hitherto. And now, with the last day of the year upon us, I must
write, even though I am still not really ready for you.

Let me, then, first of all, say how this browsing in parts of your
book has brought home to me the difficulty of establishing such a book
amongst Christians in general. I mean, of course, as a book of directly
devotional reading, and this also, surely, amongst Roman Catholics.
After all, we are still the largest body of Christians. You see, the precise
difficulty lies here, I think. You cannot well, even the largest-hearted
Protestant cannot, omit all extracts from any writings directly and
solemnly condemned by Rome ; nor can you well omit the descriptions
of scenes of the sufferings of men whom Rome considers Heresiarchs.
Yet, how on earth are we to expect " practising " Roman Catholics
to read such things on their knees, in a mood of the purest receptivity,
which is, after all, what such a book requires ? I do not at all despair
of finding, or making, a large Roman Catholic public for a collection
which would include writings, not only of Boehme, Whichcote,
John Smith, Henry Vaughan and Wordsworth ; but even of Luther,
George Fox and Lamennais, in cases where the writings selected
are previous to their condemnation, or at least are not works directly
condemned.

Of course, you will understand how little this is necessarily a criti-
cism of your book. You can reasonably appeal to a huge public, I
suppose to all except the Ritualists in the Established Church, and to all
the various Free Churches, inclusive of Quakers and Unitarians. Yet
it is well, I think, in such matters, to be completely circumspect, and for
one situated like myself to tell you just simply how he sees matters to lie.
And, in simple loyalty to truth, I must admit that my own practice has
always been, and (I doubt not) will continue to be to the end, only to
read, in such purely receptive devotional moments, such books as are

1 Book of Devotional Readings from the Literature of Christendom, Long-
mans : 1913.

204 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

either formally approved by the Roman Church, or, at least, not formally
condemned by her.

Now, as to your selection in particular, I propose to write to you
again a little later on. Yet some of the authors I have already con-
sidered. Let me then, pray, say some words about these.

I am, then, specially delighted at the choice of your two numbers,
V and VI (" Letter to Diognetus ") ; with your numbers VII and VIII
(" Justin Martyr ") ; with your three splendid numbers from Tertul-
lian ; and with your precise selections from St. Augustine. Then, again,
I am so glad you have that bit from BoSthius. Also the three extracts
from the Rule of St. Benedict. Then, how fine to have the " Death
of Bede," and also the Veni, Creator Spiritus \ I am so happy,
too, in finding here " The Canticle of the Sun," " St. Francis and
the Love of Poverty," and " The Grace of Courtesy." The Stabat
Mater Dolorosa is, I think, splendidly in place. And so is Dante's
" Rose of Paradise." The Ruysbroek is grand ; and the two Henry
Susos are finely appropriate. Walter Hilton, Juliana of Norwich and
St. Catherine of Siena are finely represented. Thomas a Kempis I do
not think could be better selected from. I am most glad that you have
chosen as you have, from St. Catherine of Genoa and from Savonarola.
The selection from Erasmus is, I think, most happy. St. Theresa
and St. John of the Cross are finely expressed here. Also St. Francis
de Sales.

I am pleased to find the two great passages from Milton's Paradise
Lost. Whichcote's Aphorisms are grand. I am so glad, too, to find
those four noble passages from my much-loved John Smith. Also
the splendid verses of Henry Vaughan. Then Blaise Pascal, George
Fox, and Traherne are finely represented. Also William Penn in his
" Character of George Fox." Joseph Butler too, and Kant, and then
my much-loved Grou, are well selected from ; and this, although Kant,
and also Goethe, do not here represent any large amount of their writings,
you have got them in their happiest, in quite exceptional moments.
Let me be frank .they were neither of them geniuses of religion. They
may have had deep, rich life - 3 but not the deepest. These selections
from Wordsworth are all quite necessary, I think, and so is Shelley's
extract. The four Carlyles are very fine, and so are the two bits from
Cardinal Newman. I am so pleased, too, to find here the three pieces
from Martineau, and to see Mazzini represented. The five Tennyson
pieces are wonderfully in place, and so are the four pieces of Robert
Browning, to whom we owe so much. Dean Church and F. W.
Robertson, the latter perhaps especially, are admirably represented, and
so is Clough, and Matthew Arnold.

Now for criticisms of some detail so far. Why do you not put on
page ix, bottom line, St. Catherine ? And why do you put on page xi

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 205

St. Clement of Alexandria ? I am sure that the latter has never attained
to a universal recognition of his sainthood ; I wish he had. Then, as
to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, I miss here that wonderful passage in his
Sermons on the Song of Songs, about the prevenience of God. I care
so much for this doctrine, so forgotten, with the very name of it so little
understood ; and this passage might be made to take the place of one
or other of those you give, beautiful though these are. Also, I should
have cared much to see here a piece out of those two great sermons on
his Brother Gerard. Surely the union of the love of God and the love
of a blood relation has never anywhere been more touchingly expressed !
Then, for St. Thomas Aquinas, I should have liked a passage bringing
out plainly his, surely undying, contribution I mean his doctrine as
to the steps and stages : as to Nature preparing Grace, and as to Grace
requiring Nature, the first looking up to the second, the second lifting
up the first. Then, as to Fenelon, I think you could have found even
more characteristic and penetrating things amongst his Spiritual Letters,
and in some of his short treatises in the controversy with Bossuet. I am
thoroughly at home in these writings, and know what I am saying.
As to the Wordsworth, I cannot but miss that magnificent " Duddon "
sonnet, finishing up with :

" We feel that we are greater than we know."

And in Browning I should have preferred one or other of the
grand passages in the " Pope " (from The Ring and the Book] to
Prospice, lovely as the latter is.

I am looking forward to reading and considering carefully the
remainder, I suppose more than one-half, up and down, of your selection ;
and to tell you, as frankly, how I feel about it. How beautifully got
up the book is, the paper, print, index, and all !

Let me wish you a very happy and successful New Year.

Yours very truly,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

Jan. 2, 1914.

My dear Maude Petre, I want, please, to tell you at once my
pleasure at your article on " Authority in Religion," in the Hibbert,
which, of course, only reached me yesterday. I have read it very care-
fully, and with great agreement on all its crucial points. It seems to
me so warm and wise, positive and constructive. . . .

. . I can, in reality, only find two things to criticise at all. The
lesser is that here, as I find to be the case with a good many of your
writings, I am got into full swing and keen interest by your argument,
and then, somehow, it does not break off as to its logic, the conclusion

206 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

is there sure enough ; but, merely as a matter of form and of proportion,
I feel as if, at the end of your articles or books, you generally somehow
hurry up and compress, out of scale with the preparatory and middle
parts. But perhaps in this case Jacks took his scissors and clipped off
some fine long bit of the bird's tail.

The more serious matter, though I am confident the difference is
chiefly one of appearance, or at least of expression, is where you speak
of the law of eternal movement. Now I am much struck and greatly
helped by the sense, now becoming so keen amongst precisely the finer
of the coming thinkers of Germany, that /the problem for us is not
strictly one of truth, but of reality ; not of whether we think correctly,
but whether there are subjects and objects corresponding, in any way
and degree, to our speculations and thoughts. And it seems to me that
this Ultimate Reality cannot be conceived (except with a sense, on our
part, that we are deliberately using images and words that we cannot
really apply), as in eternal movement or in eternal becoming. God is,
overflowingly ; and there is an end of that point. It is we who, moving
necessarily in the category of time and space, but with a keen sense that
there exists, and that we are influenced by, something other and better ;
it is we who are necessarily in movement and in becoming. Yet even
we not altogether j even we not in the very best of what we are. If
Platonism has gone as a self-sufficing system, a certain substance of it
remains imperishable in our lives. If Judaism could clean disappear as
a separate group of human beings, the central substance of Judaism
would still remain in Christianity, Mohammedanism and, indeed, else-
where. And it seems to me that all this is in case here ; I mean that,
wherever we insist upon movement, we must also indicate the rest.
Where we insist upon the necessity and right of change we should make
clear the contrasting abidingness. It is here that I find Troeltsch, in
whom I am still engrossed, so profoundly satisfying. He has never got
the one claim and emotion without the other.

Of course, I know well how truly this is the case with yourself also.
This article of yours would never have been written or delivered were
this not the case.

I take it that you have now begun your History of Modernism,
and that you are far from wanting any at all stiff book on another
subject to read just at present. Yet I want to put down for you the
name of a little book that is greatly pleasing me. It is Figgis's From
Gerson to Grotius, Cambridge University Press, 3^. 6d. net. It seems
to me such a rich, strong, sane book, and one which can teach us all
so very much.

With best New Year's wishes,

Yours most sincerely,

F. VON HttGEL.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 207

To Bernard Holland

Feb. 13, 1914.

I have now reached page 301 of those astonishingly living, deeply
touching, humorous and spiritual, abiding letters of that homely and
yet lofty soul, your Mother what a deathless honour to be able to
count her as such. I have read every word, introduction, verses and
all, often twice, three times and even more, making cross-references
and indexes as I go along, and especially marking all that will help me
with A. C. L.

May I now come to see you either Sunday, say at 4, or would next
Thursday, at the same time, or soon after, suit you better ? I am full
up between while.

I should be so glad of an hour of questions and explanations with
you first alone, and then, perhaps, Mrs. Holland would give me tea,
and also allow me to get to know her.

I will to-morrow certainly have finished all this deep, rich, letter
book. I have been hunting high and low for my own copy (given me
by himself) of Sir A. C. LyalPs Verses Written Mostly in India, but
so far in vain. If, then, you will kindly lend me your own copy,
I shall be very glad to study carefully those particular poems.

To the Same

Feb. 16, 1914.

My wife bids me say how pleased she will be to see your wife here
on Thursday, with Miss Myra Jerningham. I was myself too so glad
to make her acquaintance, and am looking forward to seeing more of
her and of yourself when I come to Harbledown Lodge, as you so kindly
propose, if not before. Will you please explain to her that, on reflection,
I am not satisfied with Pope Benedict the XIV's Letters and Com-
mentary on the Mass, either to give or to lend to her. They are dry,
and Latin and Italian writings. And I prefer to wait a little, till
(I hope) I know her better, and then to be allowed to give her something
warm and full something to feed the soul in French or English.
That might be my little return for the great interest and help of
Canterbury and Godmersham.

I go on thinking of your photograph of your mother and two sisters
at Foxholm in 1885, and of the delightfully clear presentation of that
sweet dignity and depth, Lucy Verena, and of how much that picture
would help to light up the wonderful letters from, say, 1880 to 1886.
Do, pray, think this over and put the picture into the R. 4th Edition.
And, if you do so, let me have a copy of the picture. I would, indeed,

208 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

gladly myself have it autotyped I mean, if you would give the per-
mission ; for I have rapidly acquired what I humbly believe and trust
will be a lasting devotion to these two great souls.

To Bernard Holland

March 21, 1914.

I am a bit late in returning the enclosed because my part reading up,
largely re-reading, part ruminating, and part composing my first rough
draft about your Uncle is greatly absorbing my strength and attention ;
such work has always demanded much insulation in my case much
peace and leisure of soul ; and these things again make me postpone
my more ordinary doings and duties. I do not, in any case, want to
come to you at Canterbury before this very difficult, but for me most
attractive piece of work is typed for you to consider and criticise. Then
I shall feel that I have, in a way, earned your and your wife's kind
hospitality.

Lady Miller has just kindly left me three different photographs of
her Father for me to choose from, or to refuse in favour of the one,
a copy of the one you possess. I am asking for the latter. I have read,
with much interest, Lord Cromer's and your own article in the
Quarterly, I have noted points in both to be borne in mind now in my
composition ; especially has this been the case with things said there
by yourself with a very fine balance and penetration, I think.

I often think of you five yourself, your wife, and those winsome
children Mary Sibylla's grandchildren, and Lucy's nephew and nieces,
and I love to believe that, somehow, these great souls above know and
care for you five, and you five as an organism there in your home.

To Miss Maude Petre

June 6, 1914.

My dear Maude Petre, There are several things I have to say or
to ask : three in particular, I think.

First as to Johannes Miiller's book, I am particularly glad to have
your criticisms, I see that the one concerning the practicability of
men and women friendships is very important, it seems to show much
the same but a deeper-reaching non-realisation of the delicacy of the
woman's make, as that which I found, for myself, in his urging of
co-education. In this latter case, at least, the boys could readily stand
all the strain good for the girls (J. M. sees that) ; but the girls could not,
I am sure, stand all the strain that is good, and indeed necessary, for the
boys. Still, even on this men and women friendships point, I continue
to admire the fundamental groping of the book what, I doubt not,

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 209

makes Troeltsch esteem it so highly, and what we West-Europeans have
been so much losing the sense of that the individual constitutes himself,
and is constituted into a person, never simply in isolation, but always
within, and for, and in friction with, complexes complexes, profitable
in proportion to their variety in unity. And if the family is the most
fundamental of these complexes, and the inter-attraction and supple-
mentation of sex its presupposition then he will be right in principle to
seek for us all, and most continuously for women, the family type of
complex, the nearest possible approximation to it.

As to the sufficient realisation of the greatness of celibacy as a call,
I believe you are right again. But here, too, that great general principle
seems to me still to hold since even here we need only see everywhere,
more clearly and fully than he does, the trials and troubles, and the need
for renunciation of ever-reawakening selfishness, etc., within even the
most legitimate of the human relations and attachments, to find such
celibates to be required, and their attrait to be a further proof of God
and help from Him. It is interesting to note how much more certainly
Troeltsch leads up to celibacy for some, just because he habitually sees
more keenly the need to renounce and to abstain even for the majority
for us all. . . .

. . I am revelling in Mrs. Russell Barrington's Life of Walter
Bagehot (Longmans) appearing now, 37 years after W. B.'s death,
and for the most pathetic reasons his Mother's frequent and long
insanity, and his own beautiful humbly heroic abandonment of whatever
interfered with his living with and for his Father. What a deep,
sensitive, all-alive, religious soul! I already knew this from his writings,
but his sister-in-law, who knew him so well and who writes admirably,
makes this still more clear. I want Bremond to write a series of papers
on the endless lessons of the book for the Correspondent or Revue
des Deux Mondes.

Yours affectionately,

F. v. HUGEL.

Am having long bouts of weakening local trouble hence incapaci-
tation from composition and this delightful Bagehot reading !

To the Rev. J. M. Lloyd Thomas

July 15, 1914.

I have had to spend a week away up North very pleasant, getting
an LL.D. at St. Andrews, with a little Address in Edinburgh on the
way. But this has postponed and crowded up all my work and plans.
Pray, then, forgive this tardy and hurried answer.

I much appreciate your Society's wish to listen to me, and I do
not see why I should not gain the advantage of being thus allowed to

210 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

articulate my hopes and convictions to men so keen and so kind. But I
am overwhelmed with promised work till August 10, perhaps 15 ; and
by then I shall badly want a rest of three weeks. And in September
will follow some three weeks with my dear eldest daughter whose
tuberculosis is again causing us serious anxiety, and which will prevent
her now for a second year running from coming to England so
I must go after her abroad somewhere in Northern Italy, I think,
when she descends, Romewards, from the Engadine.

Hence I see plainly that I must not pledge myself as to the time, and
that I cannot think of coming to you till after we are all again settled in
here at home. And I cannot foretell yet, what health and what work
God will have for me then. But I can and do hope that if you are
then still willing to have me I will be able to manage to come and to
speak, quite privately, to your Religious Society, sometime between, say,
October ist and Easter probably more nearly to the latter date.

Thank you, too, for offering your kind hospitality. But I see
already that if I do come, I will have to put up in some quiet hotel near
by. Experience has taught me that I must do nothing I can avoid
compatibly with the kind of work I try to do that could at all easily be
misinterpreted by the majority of my people. Such prudence is very
irksome to my natural disposition, yet I see it to be a course dear to God.
However, none the less am I grateful to you.

I must, a little later, read those Papers by your Members in the
Hibbert Journal.

I am so very glad (given that he had decided against a subscribing
Church and to join your body) that Harold Johnson had joined yourself
and those other three or four men. I am still perplexed, at times, to
note how entirely synonymous for him faith and preaching, devotion and
ministerial "work seem to be, contrary to my own attrait which makes
me so love to be lost in the crowd and in silence in Church. Hence
when H. J. came back to more explicit faith the difficulties of sub-
scription never occurred to me, a layman, for him, a layman. May he
now do, but also, and still more get much good amongst your people.
He is so good a man that I want both things to happen to him
abundantly !

Will you kindly ask me again sometime after October ist next ?
This wants no answer now.

To Miss Maude Petre

June 17, 1914-

We are looking forward to seeing you here to-day week, so please
do not trouble to answer this before then. I only want to tell you of a
pleasant little event in my life the conferring upon me by St. Andrews

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 211

the oldest of the four Scotch Universities of the Honorary LL.D.
Degree. I am to go there to receive it on July gth, stopping at
Edinburgh on the way, for two nights, there to address a private meeting
in dear old Dr. Alexander Whyte's Library. This is the first Academic
Degree or Honour I have ever received ; yet, though it comes at 62,
it comes not 6 years after my first book, and hitherto my only full
performance hence it has come quickly and handsomely.

I believe it is Prof. A. E. Taylor who has worked for this, but he
tells me that in none of the many stages of the affair was there anything
but complete unanimity. And he writes : " I had always hoped
that we might have numbered Father Tyrrell among our adopted
children, and should certainly have tried to get him as a Gifford Lecturer
if he had lived." This is good to hear, is it not ?

I admit that, of the two things, the one that I should care most to
have is the Lectureship even though, I dare say, I could not now stand
the strain of it. But need I tell you that, if it had been a question of
Fr. T. or myself how very gladly I would have waived any claim or
backing in his favour ?

We shall be away for this only from July 6 to July 1 1, inclusive of
both days j otherwise here, till at least August ist.

Yours affectionately,

F. v. HUGEL.

Tojhe Rev. Canon Newsom

Dorking : Sept. 4, 1914.

Although I am now trying to get all the rest even from letter writing
that I can (I have had much work and not a little worry ; and now the
War, as it continues, tells upon me, I expect even more than upon most
men), I really must just thank you most cordially for your letter. I am
most sincerely grateful for your affection arid sympathy. The trial is
indeed great, and one feels face to face with an upheaval, a testing of values,
such as occurs only once in, say, three or four centuries. The trial, it is
true, is considerably limited for me by the fact that Germany and Prussia
have never been synonymous, have never coalesced, for and in the Rhenish,
then Austrian, family from which, on my dear Father's side, I spring.
Yet this does not prevent one's grief at seeing what is so deep and great
in the German thought and life at its best, so obscured and driven back
by this coarse Prussianism ; nor, again, one's pain at living to see Austria
and England at war with each other, and being forced to choose, under
these circumstances, between one's Father's country and one's Mother's,
still, as to this latter choice, my Mother was English (Scotch) ; my Wife
is English ; my three Children are all born British subjects ; I have
resided, all told, over forty years in England, thirty-seven of these without

212 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

a real break, as against 2j years, all told in Austria, with but six weeks
there since I was eighteen ; and I have not a distant relative in Austria
now for the last forty years and more. So, certain also in my own
conscience as to England being in the right as against Prussia in this
War, I could not but opt for England outright ; and now, in a very few
days, I hope to obtain my naturalisation, delayed, all these years, largely
because my Wife somehow disliked the idea of it, so long as no such
alternative was real such as has come with appalling swiftness now.

May all this terrible suffering lead to much deep, spiritual good.
Surely, nothing short of this, will have deserved and outweighed the
sacrifices we are at the beginning of and for a long spell, I much fear !

To Miss Maude Petre

Dorking : Sept. 7, 1914.

I would gladly give you my impressions and opinions as to Pope
Benedict XV, if I had any ; but, in strictness, I have none, so far.
Except the mostly very general, and largely contradictory, accounts I
have found in the papers, chiefly The Times and the Daily Chronicle, I
have only two, also still too general, informations or facts of a private
kind. The one is, that I remember Padre Genocchi pretty frequently
referring to his having seen Mgr. della Chiesa about this or that matter ;
sometimes also to his having heard this or that from Mgr. della Chiesa.
Naturally at the time before the latter went as Archbishop to Bologna
.neither G. in telling me, nor I in listening, laid special stress upon
these happenings. But my impression certainly is, looking back, that
G. (with a considerable insight into character, and certainly far from
satisfaction with all or even many of the personalities he had to deal
with in Rome) respected and trusted, at least as honest and moderate,
this Monsignore.

And my second fact is that our Francesco has not infrequently told
me how Mgr. della Chiesa thought this or that, had remarked thus or
thus upon the situation ; and, here again, always with a certain respect,
as though quoting a man free from passion and partisanship.

With you, I like the choice of the name the first Benedict to follow
upon Benedict XIV, that wise and genuinely liberal, very learned Pope.
We must, however, discount this choice a little, I think, because of the
fact that Benedict XIV became Pope from the Archbishopric of Bologna,
so that Cardinal della Chiesa would have gone out of his way, had he
not taken the name he has.

It is somewhat alarming to know him only 60 ; for if he does turn
out some kind of idee-fixe man, he may have some 15-20 years in
which to apply his conviction. But the acclamation (carefully, of

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 213

course, arranged with himself) at his coronation, of not " Viva il Papa
Re " but " Viva il Papa della Pace " is very attractive ; and indeed this
War promises to be indeed already is so awful and so long, especially
in its effects, that his Pontificate may well consist in little more than
helping to settle Europe again and into happier conditions. And if
B. XV can work at this really without a thought remaining for that old,
worn out Temporal Power, how much he could, he will do ! But the
Vatican, will it let him ? Or will he have the strength to rid us finally
of this long-festering wound ? We must pray and hope and wait.

Affectionate old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

I am to settle in again at home on Sept. 2ist, after two further
little visits. But the home address always finds me. It really looks
now as if the tide was at last turning in favour of the Allies also in the
West. What a spectacle and tragedy it all is ! And yet noble and
hopeful things too confronting our stunned gaze.

To Leslie Johnston

Oct. 9, 1914.

It is already some time back that Edwyn Bevan sent me a typed copy
of that interesting Examen de Conscience of yours, leading to, and
defending, your decision to serve in this War. I would, after repeated
very appreciative reading (also aloud) of this Paper, have written to
thank you for it, had not B. in sending it added that he would, later on,
give me your correct (present) address. And this, up to the moment
now, he has not done. But I am very glad to have the print. If the
typed copy would still be of use to you, pray let me have a P.C. and I
will send it to you. Otherwise, I keep it for use alongside of the print.

That little XX Commonwealth interview with me, was not by
Harvey, indeed not by any friend of mine, but simply by a young man
of the Staff of the Paper sent by Dawson, the Editor. I would not
myself have chosen this organ and this method ; but the very polite and
modest persistency of the young man seemed to make it a bit of conceit
to refuse to say a few things which certainly, at the time, all appeared
to me true or likely. I am well aware, however, that a very few days
were sufficient to at least seem to belie my hopes as to German
Professors Eucken being reported in The Times as saying those
extravagantly incorrect and unreal things.

I did not, however, when communicating these opinions of mine,
forget what I knew well .how large had been, and still was, the share
precisely of German Professors, in feeding, or at least in not sufficiently
or efficaciously opposing, this arrogant and quite unchristian Prussian

214 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Militarism (of course, I am also aware that this spirit is not monopolised
by Prussia, though Prussia has, I think, been its classical training ground
and exponent). Yet I had concrete cases of impressive Professorial
protests in the past especially that very noble one of the seven Gottingen
Professors in 1830-1833 against the despotic acts of the first King of
Hanover. And I still continue to hope that some German Professors
will do more than hold their tongues till the end of the War that they
will speak out what they have seen and felt all along, or, at least, what
they will have come to see as clearly as you and I do, before the War is
over. For I am, in very deed, deeply, wholeheartedly on the side of
England in this War. I say " in this War," not as though I did not
love my Mother's, Wife's, and Children's country, my inspiration since
(at 1 8) I fell under the spell of Burke, and of my great-uncle, General
Outram, of Lucknow fame, a country which, my home for 40 years,
is now also technically my own country (my naturalisation will be
complete in a few days now) ; but because not every English war could be
defended by us as just, although this one can most entirely, and, hence,
ought to be helped in every legitimate way open to us.

I have not seen the Student Movement manifestos you refer to.
I am sorry ; although I must not pretend ever to have taken to that
Movement with any instinctive comprehension. I felt it (perhaps
quite mistakenly) too vague and yet also still Protestant in a subtly
doctrinaire sense.

May you, my dear Johnston, find more and more peace and interior
harmony and growth, in this your devoted undertaking. And may,
in moments of obscurity and trial (which cannot fail to come to you),
some support spring up for you from the consciousness that there are
others, such as he who writes this, older than yourself alas, for them !
and half of German blood, who see and feel the Tightness, the inevitable-
ness of this, our present going to war with Germany, and the solid
wisdom and devotedness of your act. And I love to feel sure that, to
the very end however long this War may last, and however violent
and unjust may be the delusions and methods of the other side, you will
escape embitterment, and will not like Cramb, with all his insight
at the mere surface level, retain fully the conviction of the curable-
ness, as of individuals, so of nations and races. Certainly we are seeing
with our own eyes Frenchmen now astonishingly different from what I
knew them in 1870. They have become real and modest under defeat,
whilst the Germans have, for the time, lost the sense of the real world
and of their own limitations and their share (no more than a share) in
that world. Humiliation can, and will (in part, if and because we
hope and believe it) change and improve Germans, our brethren now,
as were the French when we had to fight them, so hard and so long,
in Napoleonic times.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 215

We are all in God's hands, and doubtless you may not return. Yet
I love to realise that the chances are considerably on the side of your
returning. And certainly there are few among the younger men whose
going I should feel more or even as much, few if any from whom
I hope better or as good work for God, for Christ, and for the Church.

I have been so pleased with what I have, so far, been able to read of
your most useful book on the Eastern Substitutes for Christ. And I
so care to dwell upon how this war, if it does not send you, more or less,
straight to heaven, can and will so greatly mature you for the kind of
work we both of us so love and so long to do with fruit.

I will very specially think and pray for you, till all is over and, please
God, you are back again, relatively disengaged from such absorbing,
exceptional work again. And do you, please, also remember me, alas,
unable to serve in the trenches or on the battle-field, but who would
much wish to have my modest place in the great army of those who
work and suffer for their own and their fellow-men's deepened spiritual
life for the deepening of this spiritual life, and the growth of its
application to men's public and corporate acts.

Yours very cordially and sincerely,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

Dec. 30, 1914.

Here we are at the end of the poor, warring 1914, and I must, at
last, write to thank you for your letter to The Times, 1 for sending it me,
and still more for writing it ; and also to wish you a full and fruitful and
happy New Year. Certainly, the former two qualities are most actively
present in your life, specially also at this moment!

I thought that little letter of yours perfect for its very useful, indeed
necessary, purpose and within your self-imposed limits.

I herewith send you my second and last Troeltsch Paper. I fear it
is hard and crabbed writing, yet the passages from Troeltsch in my
II s section are, surely, splendid. I for one, at least, can never read them
m the original without the deepest emotion. In my section II 4 I have
attempted a criticism and somewhat different philosophy which I believe
to be important, and which, in any case, cost me much long incubation.
And surely T.'s estimate of the originality of St. Thomas, in my
section II 1 , is most valuable : certainly I never myself realised this
originality thus before T. taught it me. I feel altogether now that
there is something thin and (objectively) ungrateful in L.'s attitude
towards St. Th. ignorant it very certainly is. But indeed Descartes
was the same only, worse ; and even such believers and warm souls

1 " Let us be English " as against prejudiced attacks on the character of the
enemy (note by Miss Petre).

2i 6 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

as Sir Thomas More, and, before him, Nicolas of Cues, have already
much of this non-comprehension. They were at the fag-end of the
Middle Ages, and saw no more the great, permanent truths of its
golden time.

I hope soon to be able to send you a " pull " of my article for the
Jan. Church Quarterly Review on " Christianity in Face of War : its
Strength and Difficulties," the working out of which has taught me
much. I now see, plainly for myself, how war is but one (the most
elemental) of the functions of the State; how its conception, as pre- or
sub-moral, as moralisable or not, as moral rises and sinks with that of
the State; how profoundly right von Gierke, F. W. Maitland, A. L.
Smith are that man the individual becomes man a person only in and
through his willing service of, and moulding by, the great spontaneous
and normal human (hence humanisable, indeed already essentially
humane) complexes, the Family, the Commune, the Guild, the Church,
the State ; how none of these complexes is just the sum-total of the
human units composing it, and yet also none is a simply physical force,
or non-moral aggregation ; and how, in the earlier, fruitful Middle
Ages, the Church worked for the development of her own complex, as
the most directly and richly moral complex, but not for the emptying
of the State complex the reducing it to a pre-moral requisite, a thing,
a sort of embryo, into which the Church alone possessed of a soul
could breathe a, thus borrowed, moral ideal and life ; which latter
process begins with Pope Innocent IV (about 1240 A.D.) ; and, after
the Protestant Reformation, gets developed fully by Suarez and the
XVIIth century Catholic theologians generally. Nothing more
cold, hardly anything more " Real-politisch," than the latter view of the
State can be conceived. And the statesmen join hands with the
theologians in this work of de-personalising, demoralising the State ;
for only thus can the secular State, the statesmen, fully escape the direct
control of the theologians, whose domain is Faith and Morals. I believe
we are here at one of the roots now nearly 700 years old of what,
surely, is a very striking fact : the complete silence, acquiescence of the
big German Catholic centre party in the Prussian, " the State- Machine,"
temper and practice. That party fought to the death against that
State's interference in Church affairs ; that party will join the Pope in
wanting peace as soon as possible, and in attending to the wounded, etc.
But that party has placed no obstacle whatsoever in the way of " Real-
politik," .it has no instinctive recoil from such political materialism
at least I cannot find it.

I have loved to find how free we Catholics are from any Definition,
or otherwise doctrinally authoritative document in favour of the
" persona ficta " conception of the State. Indeed, Ginibaldo Fieschi's
coining of the phrase, as a canonist, even though he did become Pope

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 217

soon afterwards, and perhaps used it in Papal documents (the latter, I do
not know to be the case), is greatly outweighed, as to official weight,
by such an emphatic pronouncement as Leo Xlllth's fine Encyclical
" Ineffabilis Deus " where, though the phrase " persona " is not used,
the State appears so complete a society, with so immanent and sui-generis
life and right of its own, as surely, to suggest and to require a certain
real personality of its own. But this you can find more at length in
the chapter "The Jesuits" of Figgis's From. Gerson to Grotius,
which I gave you. And it has been a deep tonic to me to find in the
Protestant Troeltsch and the more or less Agnostic A. L. Smith, so
strong an antipathy to the "persona ficta" conception of the State with
a penetrating sense of the greatness of the Papacy at its best, of its
representing nobly the Givenness, that central character, of Religion.
Figgis fails at this profound point, as does (I now see it) Acton. And it
is T. and S. who have made me clip this quite crisply.

Do pray forgive my thus running on. But, as you will guess, there
are only a few friends to whom I can do so ; besides, it all turns on sub-
jects burned into our minds by this terrible war.

Yours affectionately,

F. v. H.

I have two long letters about the new Pope from one who knows
him very well. I take B. XV to be a man who will silently drop all
" vigilance committees," etc. ; and will try to avoid all condemnations.
But that he is an administrator, not at all a thinker, and hence will avoid
taking the big questions as whole.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Rome : March 20, 1915.

My dear kind Bishop Talbot, You wrote me a most winning, and
indeed all too handsome, letter about the New Year ; and, lo and
behold, I answer almost three months later! But the above address
a greatly unexpected one, as far as I myself am concerned, will, of
itself, indicate to you that besides my literary work, and the various
anxieties and activities which the War has, in so many ways, been im-
posing upon us all, other domestic cares have been at work within me
and around me. The fact is that the health of our dear eldest, always
delicate and at times precarious, has, these last 7, 8 weeks been so
anxious-making, that we could no longer leave her excellent husband
here unsupported by some of her family. And since my wife is con-
fined to the house at home, with chills threatening bronchitis (the latter,
always dangerous with her) ; and since, too, she has been seeing this our
eldest both these last years, for many weeks at a time, whereas I had not

2i 8 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

seen her for close upon three years : we decided, our second daughter
and I, on Thursday, March 4, to come away from Kensington the next
day. And after three nights of boat and train the former accompanied
(at night) by two British Warships we got here on Monday March 8th.
Our invalid is now, at last, bettering seriously ; but an operation of
medium size was necessary to remove an abscess ; and, although this
has been very successfully performed, it took place only two days ago.
So she is of course (though already much relieved) still weak. We
expect to be here for some four or five weeks more, so as to be able
(D.V.) to enjoy her company when she has fully recovered from these
weeks of trial. We so gladly believe she has now a good spell of much
better health before her, even though I suppose, she will always remain
a person of delicate complexion.

I need hardly tell you, how much apart from this dear child's
needs and the consolation of being near her I wanted to remain in
London (or, at least, in England) till the end of the War, thus in
touch with all the latest news, and with the friends and fellow-sym-
pathisers in this great crisis. Still, even now, this War moves so slowly,
and the great outlines of what is happening reach us so really also here,
that one suffers less than one would otherwise from such an (involuntary)
absence. And then here also we find warm support and sympathy on
and for the Allies' side (and this, without any revanche feeling or plans),
amongst our English and Scotch clergy. The Italian opinion, where
it runs more or less parallel with that of the Allies, is more or less all,
I think, distinct from this. It is anti- Austrian, not anti-Prussian ;
and it aims at territorial acquisitions, not at the abolition of a system and
mentality. But, of course, we Western Allies also hold strongly the
principle of nationality ; and the territories desired by Italy are
certainly Italian in their population.

Naturally, once here, I find my interests in Rome, which nine
half-yearly stays had matured up to the spring of 1902, reviving here,
in spite of domestic and public anxieties. One change that struck me
at once as most consoling, is the number of really fine, dignified new
(mostly Parish) Churches that stand about in Rome now so clean
(no spitting) with the large congregations as reverent and recollected
as in any Church in England not a head looking about, not even a
child distracted. And catechizings going on, several days a week, in
these Churches young ladies having classes, in one aisle of boys, in
another of girls, and doing the work evidently with real zest and
success. The visitation of the poor and the sick has also all been
thoroughly waked up. And if you ask here " Who has done all this ? "
the answer always is " Pius X. more than anyone," more than probably
all the other influences put together. It is all a very good illustration
of how thoroughly reformable men are, even in points of an apparently

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 219

hopelessly racial, unchangeable kind. But I note, with interest, that
these changes have been effected in and through these new Churches and
Congregations. The old ones, I am told, remain much what they were.

Before coming away from home, I was able to finish up all for
publication, in the Quest for April, of the first of two Articles on " The
German Soul and the Great War." You shall receive a " pull " of
this, and I hope you will like it. I had hoped to be given " pulls "
of my C.Q. paper on " Christianity in Face of War." I must
admit that I continue to feel the central contention of that Paper
to be of great importance ; and I shall be very glad and grateful
if this War ends by bringing it into massive, vivid, unescapable evidence
and to a true and long-lasting solution. So (but only so, I submit) will
our poor European humanity get back a full (and indeed overflowing)
result for its terrible sacrifices. But if all this is well-founded, then we
must not talk, or think, of peace, until the psychology of the German
people is deeply changed, or rather until their own special temperament
and character wakes up to a sense that, somehow, there is something
wrong and sterilising about " Real-politik." We must hold on till
then, for such " Real-politik " can be fully demonstrated to be folly,
but only slowly and at great cost for all concerned, since the demonstra-
tion has also to be " real," and, in the first instance not as something
morally wrong, but as something which does not work, does not pay.
And, of course, we will throughout remember that the first and greatest
sufferers from this Prussian " Realism " are the Germans, is the German
nature itself ; that this " Realism " is not confined to Germany ; and
that we must carefully guard against all revenge, retaliation, etc. We
can, and must, and will, love all that is great in the German character
and contribution to the world's riches ; and, because of this, we can and
will work against crushing Prussianism, till the Germans themselves wake
up to its suicidal nature. The Daily Telegraph of Tuesday March 9,
p. 7, col. a, b, gave a deeply interesting account of an old American
Diplomat as to what happened in 1870, and the Papers of Cereal.
The thing was entirely new to me, and has made me much more hopeful
as to the change we must look to in the German outlook itself. If you
have not already read this amazing story, there or elsewhere, do please
do so now.

Before leaving home, I also got well into the Memoir of Archbishop
Temple's life, as abridged, etc., from the long Life by W. T., the
son. I have always had a deep feeling about and for Dr. T. so strong
and sane and simple : quelqu'un, and no mistake. And now I was
getting fine, bracing instruction from this book. I will finish it, when
I get home, as carefully weighing each word of his letters etc. as I
have begun it. And with the son I have had a little correspondence
about the proof, which he sent me, of his Need for a Catholic Church

220 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

a piece of work which, of course, pleased me greatly during long
tracts of its exposition, yet I felt it strange that W. T. there so little
realised, so little stressed, the primary end and function, surely, of every
Church deserving of the august name the awakening souls to, the
preparing them for, the holding before them embodiments of, the other
life, the life beyond the grave. Very certainly, the Church has also
to help in the amelioration of this life ; but, I submit, always after, and
in subordination to, and penetrated by, that metaphysical, ontological,
other-worldly sense and life which alone completes and satisfies fully
awakened man. And only thus shall we be in a position to be fair to
the Church's work in the past ; for the first object and range of this her
care and labours will, and ought to be, distinct from and beyond social
improvements. Here . . . the Dean of St. Paul's sees refreshingly
clearly.

I found, in my " D.T." at breakfast this morning, that your poor
leg is better, and that now a week ago you have gone for a change
to Devonshire. . . . We have been so sorry for your long trouble, but
are now so glad it is better. I take it that I can count on being at
home by the beginning of May ; may you be as well as ever by then,
or (better still) before then.

With kind regards also from my second Daughter to your Wife
and to Miss Talbot,

I am, my dear Bishop,

Yours very sincerely and cordially,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Sept. 6, 1915.

My dear, much-tried Bishop Talbot, Yesterday I fulfilled a six
months term of really unbroken anxiety, sadness and sacrifice, yet,
thank God, of light and love, not my own, but His the time of watching
the dearly loved life of our first-born disappearing from this our earthly
scene. She went on August the I2th, after having, a week before,
received once more (at her own request) Extreme Unction, with a
grand lucidity of mind and deliberate fulness of resignation to God's
Will a resignation full of the heroic and supernatural, since, even then,
her instinct was one of abundant vitality indeed she really had still
within her, at the time, forces amply sufficient for another 30 or 40
years of a very full existence. We had thus to watch how God, in His
mysterious, but most assuredly all-wise and all-loving Providence,
Himself undid, or Himself allowed to be undone, the very gifts and
bonds and orders He Himself had given and matured. At thirty-eight
He took her from a Husband, whose constant joy, pride and support

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 221

she was, and from us all, her devoted relations and friends most of all
next to him from myself, her father, whose darling help and
sympathiser she ever was.

I venture thus to dwell a little upon the cross and the grace of
these our late Roman months, because I feel that these quite fresh
experiences give me some little right, some scrap of authority, to tell,
you of the grief and shock with which, only some hours ago, I heard of
your, not all unlike, bereavement. 1 Somehow perhaps during our
saddest time in Rome or on our journey home we missed seeing the
news in the papers. So please forgive if, with this my poor sympathy,
I come somewhat late.

It was last September, when my Wife and I came to you, to your
tea on the lawn at the Castle, that we saw we last saw this your
youngest son, in his khaki uniform, so full of life and confidence. He
has gone, I suppose, some twelve years younger than our Gertrud,
your youngest as against our eldest, gone, I suppose, quite suddenly,
as against her long years of heroic self-discipline in and through pain.
How impossible it would be to measure the one pathos against the other,
or your own sacrifice against our own. I only know that we suffer
and that you suffer you and his Mother especially, whose darling child
he particularly was ; that my Wife and I feel most deeply for you and
for her, in this trouble (coming so soon, too, after her loss of those
two fine brothers) ; and that we pray very earnestly for God's support
to be as abundant in your own cases as it has been in ours.

It was only in getting back here, a week ago, that I found, amongst
the accumulated papers and books, that fine sermon of yours before the
University of Cambridge. I need hardly tell you that, in my careful
reading and rumination of it, I have not found a hint or implication
even for which I am not deeply grateful : it has throughout that difficult
truly catholic balance and richness a full other-worldliness without a
touch of rigorism.

With deep sympathy and respect,

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HiiGEL.

It would be very nice if we could meet soon ! I have been learning
much.

To Miss Maude Petre

Sept. 14, 1915.

Time flies so, that we have already passed the month's mind of that
darling child's 2 going to God. And I owe you, all this time, warm
thanks for your short, but pregnant and most kind, letter of condolence.

1 A son of the Bishop had been killed in the war.

2 His daughter Gertrud.

222 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

But not only was the fortnight, that we remained on in Rome after her
going, brimful of things to do, mostly saddening or dreary, yet all things
which could not be put off : also this our first fortnight at home, has been
one in which it was difficult to write. True, I have written a good many
letters, but all have been of sympathy with some of the appallingly large
number of people struck, directly or indirectly, by the War, or letters
of communication of our own trouble to the few people who, though
caring, were not likely to hear of it without such direct telling. Also
I have been and am weary, I suppose, as the reaction from all those
months of waiting and watching.

And yet how ungrateful and unreal it would be, to forget, and not
permanently to thank God for, the experiences and the lessons of that
time as to the superiority of the spirit over sense and the body : as to
the quite fresh and full power of faith in and love of God ; and as to
the reality, and (in its central facts and forces) not strangeness, of that
full, true life beyond these our earthly sufferings and the grave. I was,
too, deeply impressed by, and grateful for, the very marked growth of
soul I could not but notice in G. since I had last seen her, nearly three
years before. Those deepest gifts and graces, which Father Tyrrell
and Abbe Huvelin had so nobly and delicately fostered during her time
of strain and relative confusion, these latter so truly caused by my own
too great, my thoughtless leaning upon a woman's mind 23 years my
junior, had now blossomed into a most touching, most generous
profusion. The note of true childlikeness was in everything she did,
thought and felt, especially also in those great and most various sufferings
which (a quite unusual thing in this malady) were felt with increasing
keenness up to twelve hours before the end. One of her mental
distresses and disappointments was that her weakness prevented her, on
most days, even from talking over our mutual friends and past joint
experiences, and did not even allow her to listen to the reading of any-
thing but a novel. Yet she did get in some affectionate and grateful
remarks, more than once, about Father Tyrrell ; and about yourself
also she spoke with cordial interest. We found, in a will she drew up
at Helouan, I believe in November 1908, a clause : "To Father
Tyrrell, 10, for the buying of any books he may want, as a mark of
gratitude and respect." And, of course, Francesco and H. and I would
promptly have carried this out had Father T. been alive. Indeed,
even so, Francesco wanted to send you that money towards the publica-
tion of writings of Fr. T.'s up to the date of that will or the like.
But we found that this, as well as a touching little legacy to myself, had
to be dropped, because the 100 deposited by her in London for these
and other small legacies, had been, later on, withdrawn by her to Rome
doubtless to cover the heavy expenses of her illnesses.

It was most helpful and bracing to follow her acts on August 5th

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 223

just a week before she went. For, at 6 o'clock that afternoon, she asked
me whether I thought she was dying that she was sure all the Drs.
and Nurses thought so, but that she herself did not feel like it. I told
her, I was sure as to the terrible virulence of the disease ; as to the
astonishing vitality and capacity for long resistance of her constitution ;
and (above all) as to our only absolute certainties being the mysterious
but full wisdom of God's Will, and the privilege and protection of
willing that alone. A little later she asked to receive Extreme Unction
a second time ; permission was given ; and at 9 P.M. she received it>
in the presence of the three Nun Nurses and of us three relatives. She
herself answered all the responses, and actively helped Mgr. Gallimberti
in the exposure and handling of the poor worn limbs she never was
more conscious or more freely-willing in her life.

And thus, in the midst of one's literally irreplaceable loss, there
well up springs of water of eternal life ; and we can stand most bracingly
abashed before God's goodness working in and through her.

I was much touched, at the time, with your letter telling of dear,
fine Ben's 1 going. I wanted to write, also then ; but I had got into
a condition of procrastination and of drift as to my correspondence.
Gertrud's own sweet little animals, that she rescued and adopted from
off the Roman streets, the inseparables Hassan (the fat little terrier dog)
and Bettie (the thin tall black cat), have felt G.'s going most touchingly.
The dear little things are to remain together with an old charwoman
of G.'s, whom they know and love much. I felt that somehow G.'s
long tenderness for these small creatures of God that that, too, had
been pleasing to Him, and would not be forgotten by Him now. And
as to your Ben of course you felt his going much, 'and very much !

On getting back here, I found your very interesting-looking, and
doubtless thoroughly useful, book on the War. I have not yet begun
it, but intend to do so, soon, although my own composition work so
all but completely abandoned for six months now clamours for my
close attention. But another book of yours not your composition but
your most kind gift. I have now, in this fortnight immediately follow-
ing upon my re-immersion in the ancient Roman world, read through,
without a break, most attentively and with great profit and enjoyment
all these teeming pages, I can see now, very clearly, why Fr. T., and
Bremond, and you, so much admired the book ; but also why I so much
disliked the earlier Pater the writer of the Renaissance studies, if
these be taken (as I, then a young man, was sure to take them), without
supplementation or allowance. I take it that " Marius " himself is
very really Pater not only Pater, in what Marius gains at last, but
Pater also in his Marius's succession and causes of conviction. " New

1 My sheep-dog and a devoted friend of G. T. Died while I was working in
a French hospital. (Note by Miss Petre.)

224 VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS

Cyrenaicism, " in Vol. I, and " Second Thoughts," in Vol. II, seem to me
the very heart of the book, and of Pater's own interior history. And,
if so, then, as a young 'man, I only knew I only could know Pater,
the New Cyrenaic (to my own instinct, a very unattractive position or
Itat d'dme) ; and now I know Pater, of the Second Thoughts, who from,
on occasion of, and (I should say) in spite of Cyrenaicism, reaches out
(with remarkable vividness of apprehension, and a very fine analysis
of this apprehension's causes) to the new, deeper and deepest life of
Christianity. And this second position, or, rather, the entire history
of the two positions, and of the transition from one to the other all
this is absorbingly interesting. And yet, of course, it does not, by any
means, exhaust the attractions of this most many-sided book. The
pictures of the various country and town religious rites, of Fronto,
Apuleius, Lucian, especially of Marcus Aurelius, his strength and his
weakness, also the sketches of Cornelius and Caecilia it is all deeply
impressive and suggestive. And, as I went along, I have, on most
pages, made notes as to the authorities for P.'s pictures and histories
a very pleasant occupation.

I still cannot, indeed, admire his style : I see how much better he
writes than I could ever write ; but never does he awaken in me a wish
to be able to write like that. For it is, to my feeling, altogether too
" cooked " and laboured, it smells of the lamp ; it is, pretty often,
dangerously near to preciousness. Nowhere does it stand out as just
simply inevitable, as something which, given the thought, could not be
otherwise. If it is not unlike the writing of the younger Pliny, of
Lucian, of Martial, this means that it is unlike the really great Greek
and Roman Classics, men, primarily of religion, or of statesmanship,
or other action, and who, later on in life, took to writing never as a
profession, but always only as a vehicle for more than form, however
exquisite.

Yet how much of real, indeed deep thought Pater reached, and here
communicates I think, in a form hardly worthy of the Christian
hierarchy of values, although entirely fitting for the earlier, aesthetic
stage. I am making copious references to his pages as to the double
ideal (the ascetic and the self-developing) in life and indeed in Christi-
anity. The passages are most deep and true, I feel.

Pray, then, accept my warmest thanks for these rich volumes, and
forgive the shameless length of this letter. When you are up in town
I assume that you are not abroad, or going thither just now it will
be very pleasant and helpful to me to talk over various observations made
now abroad. I saw plenty of Canet, of Duchesne, of Scotti, and of a
few others.

Yours affectionately,

F. v. HUGEL.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 225

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Oct. 2, 1915.

It was a great pleasure getting your cordial little note yesterday,
and to know you so happy and braced in your military chaplaincy ;
also that the fine little Wife and charming children are doing so well.
Of course, as with all things here below, the situation has its mixed
character, and its cost. I loved to think I might be looking you all up,
now and then, from now to next summer, in Vincent Square. And I
was delighted at your promise to give us a Troeltsch paper at a L.S.S.R.
Meeting ; I would so gladly have backed up what you were sure to say
so well about him. And, generally, your presence at our meetings
will be greatly missed. May this terrible War be over, quite satis-
factorily for us the Allies and all that is deep and great, and necessary
for the best of Germany also sooner than still looks at all likely. And
then amidst so many other good things, we can look to see you
I hope very well and strong amongst us again.

I note that you are not really aware of the great, utterly abiding
cross and loss that it has pleased God to demand of, and to put upon me.
Our dearest eldest daughter the soul closest to me upon earth in all my
intellectual work, plans and trials, the one, too, that I tried most
extensively to help and to make grow left our poor dim troubled earth
on August 1 2th. She went with a full acceptance and loving devoted-
ness to God's Will, as utterly right and loving, which were all the more
supernatural and inspiring for us who watched her so closely, because,
as all the Nurses and Doctors declared, there was a vitality within her
abundantly sufficient to furnish forth a rich, vigorous existence for another
thirty years at least ; and because she thus had to leave a husband who,
already bereft of both parents, possessed of but one and a half-witted
sister and of no children, lost his one real human support and utterly
devoted companion in her. Next to him, I believe that I myself am the
greatest sufferer from this blow ; yet her sisters, her brothers-in-law, and
her many devoted friends are also deeply feeling the disappearance from
their lives of something so immensely alive, warm, and self-oblivious.

Nothing, too, could have been finer than the steady helpfulness, the
union of professional competence, human tenderness and supernatural
faith and radiance, of those English Nun Nurses, and of their very fine
Italian Chaplain. Truly Troeltsch is right, still, under our very eyes,
God, the great Reality, and faith in Him as such, and the Beyond, and
real faith in its reality are the power and peace of our little human
Here and Now. I send you her Mortuary Card, some of which you
will like, I think. We planned it out very carefully the Dante, and
the Texts, also the devotion to the Sacred Heart and that Assisi Giotto
are most characteristic of her.

226 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

A Henri Garceau

Quatrifeme Dimanche aprfes 1'Epiphanie, 1916.
Cheri, Je t'ecris ce petit mot pour te dire trois choses.

1. Je regrette que toi et ton petit frere soyez indisposes. Mais
c'est bien que toi tu te portes beaucoup mieux aujourd'hui. Que le
petit frere se remette fort vite aussi ; et que mon cher Didi soit demain
de nouveau tout en ordre !

2. Je voudrais que ce matin tu lises (si tu es suffisamment remis
pour cela) les prieres principales, que nous avons fixees, en ton Paroissien
les Prieres de VOrdo et du Canon de la Messe. Si cela te fatiguerait
trop, dis, au lieu, un Pater, un A*ve, et les Actes de Foi, d'Esperance, de
Charite pensant, en les disant, a Jesus s'offrant a Dieu le Pere en la
Messe, et t'offrant tout a Lui, pour qu'Il te possede et te guide ! Ainsi
nul Dimanche ou Ffite d'Obligation ne passera sans que tu ailles a la
Messe, au moins en esprit.

3. Si, quand Mercredi arrive, tu peux faire la Leon avec moi, mais
tu ne devrais guere sortir, ta chere Mere me le laissera savoir ; et
alors je viendrais chez toi.

Si je ne re?ois aucune nouvelle, je t'attendrais ici, ce jour-la, &
6 hres.

Que Dieu te benisse, cheri.

H.

To a Friend in his last illness

1916.

I need hardly assure you that your illness the weakness and pain
you are suffering, in their various degrees and kinds of tryingness that
all these things are now very much in my mind and heart. Indeed
they remain constantly present before me, even when they have to be
in the background of my consciousness.

With our dearest Gertrud we were able, for a considerable time,
to hope that God would still give her many a year of life. And you
yourself are not yet sixty, or barely that. May God give you yet many
a year of life ! But quite distinct from the question of the length of
her life, was that of the quality of it of the suffering and limitations
mingling with, and imposed upon, pretty well all her activities. All
these things were a present, indeed a pressing question.

And, looking back now, I am grateful for nothing so much as for
this that, given the suffering and trials which God then sent or per-
mitted, He also soon gave her a light, far more vivid and continuous
than it used to be, and an evergrowing acceptance and active utilisation
of it, as to the place, meaning and unique fruitfulness of such suffering,

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 227

thus met (as it were) half-way, in the mysterious, but most certain, most
real scheme of the deepest life and of God.

When we first got to Rome, she was wonderfully plucky and
courageous, " grinning and bearing," a dear stoic. But then gradually
she became, in this too, more and more sensitively Christian. The
Cross became, not simply a fact, to bear somehow as patiently as we
can, but a source and channel of help, of purification, and of humble
power, of a permanent deepening, widening, sweetening of the soul.
It was God's holy Will in her case that all this growth should
promptly be for the other life. But it would, of course, in no way
have been less precious had she been allowed to live on here, thus so
greatly deepened and expanded, and rendered so far more helpful than
ever before, and that for many a year.

I put all this to yourself, as I do to myself, because I have long felt
that it is the apparent sterility of suffering which adds the final touch of
trial to our pains ; and that this appearance is most truly only an appear-
ance. Not, of course, that suffering, simply of itself, is good or operates
good ; but that God is more living and real than all suffering and all
sin ; and that He can, and will, and does give concomitant opportunities
and graces and growths to the sufferer, if and when the latter is humble,
watchful and prayerful in such utilisations.

How I wish I could help much, very much, to lessen your pains,
but I admit above all, towards their transmutation ! You can and
will now help us all a hundred times more than when you were in
health ; suffering can be the noblest of all actions.

Yours affectionately,

F VON HUCEL.

To the Same

Feb. 28, 1916.

Only this morning could I get rid of MS. for publication pressed for
by Dent. And now the first letter I write, amongst the many that have
not been written for three weeks owing to that absorption, shall be to
yourself.

I have been hearing from your L , that strength has been returning
to you, but that, with it, the discomforts have increased apparently.
I am very glad as to the former point, and truly sorry as to the latter.
May the first continue, and the second disappear !

I was so very glad to get your letter, and to see from that what I
was anyhow convinced must be the case the devotedly straight, simple
and humble way in which you are taking your great trial, thus turning
your " passion " into an action, and what of itself only sours or revolts
into a sweetening and strengthening of the soul.

228 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

told me of the help you were finding in the Gospels and the
Imitation. How almost purely literary their effect is upon us, when
we are not suffering, or (at least) when we have not suffered and
much ! But when massive or penetrating pain comes, and if we then
even only try, even only wish, to meet straightly and severely those
bitter waters ; then those books cease to be so much writing they
become alive with Christ our Life, Who, wheresoever He touches at all
fully, brings life and love in and through the very Cross.

If you feel you have room for, or wish for, any further tonic reading
of a spiritual kind, let me recommend Dom Leclercq O.S.B. (Les dctes
authentiques des Martyrs, Volume I jusqu'a la Paix de 1'figlise. Paris.
Oudin). I gave the book to my son-in-law, exposed, at 6000 feet
above sea-level, to wounds and death from day to day. He writes
that it suits exactly, and braces him up profoundly. I would so gladly
lend or give you a copy, if I had one, but I have not. Besides, you may not
feel any want for more of such reading. I suppose the Catholic Lending
Library in South Street, W., has got it, or I could get it for you from
Paris, I think in a week from receipt of your wishes.

How wonderful it is, is it not, that literally only Christianity has
taught us the true peace and function of suffering. The Stoics tried
the hopeless little game of denying its objective reality, or of declaring
it a good in itself (which it never is), and the Pessimists attempted to revel
in it, as a food to their melancholy, and as something that can no more
be transformed than it can be avoided or explained. But Christ came,
and He did not really explain it ; He did far more, He met it, willed it,
transformed it, and He taught us how to do all this, or rather He Him-
self does it within us, if we do not hinder the all-healing hands.

Pray for us all, even just in passing, please. In suffering, we are
very near to God.

Your affectionate old friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Same

March 6, 1916.

I have your three letters all written since I last wrote all before
me ; and I want, first of all, to say that you will never, please, take any
little delay in answering as the least index of my feelings. I had to toil
under much pressure till this last Saturday afternoon two days ago.
And then a chill drove me to bed and to sloppy food till lunch time
to-day, Monday.

But unless I am absolutely prevented by ill-health or work that will
not brook any break, I will write to you every Monday late afternoon,
unless (or until) you do not find any special help in such frequent letters,
or for any other reason which you need not ever specify.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 229

First then, about books. I have ordered from Paris two copies of
Leclercq's Actes Authentiques, and as soon as we have them you, your
own copy, and I, mine we will begin reading those splendid docu-
ments, as our spiritual food ; that daily quarter of an hour, for now
forty years or more, I am sure has been one of the great sustenances and
sources of calm for my life. Of course, such " reading " is hardly
reading in the ordinary sense of the word at alL As well could you call
the letting a very slowly dissolving lozenge melt imperceptibly in your
mouth, "eating." Such reading is, of course, meant as directly as
possible to feed the heart, to fortify the will, to put these into contact
with God thus, by the book, to get away from the book, to the realities
it suggests, the longer the better. And, above all, perhaps it excludes,
by its very object, all criticism, all going off on one's own thoughts as,
in any way, antagonistic to the book's thoughts ; and this, not by any
unreal (and most dangerous) forcing of oneself to swallow, or to " like,"
what does not attract one's simply humble self, but (on the contrary) by
a gentle passing by, by an instinctive ignoring of what does not suit one's
soul. This passing by should be without a trace of would-be objective
judging ; during such reading, we are out simply and solely to feed our
own poor soul, such as it is hie et num. What repels or confuses us
now, may be the very food of angels ; it may even still become the light
to our own poor souls in this world's dimness. We must exclude none
of such possibilities, the " infant crying for the light " has nothing to
do with more than just humbly finding, and then using, the little light
that it requires.

I need not say that I would not restrict you to only one quarter of
an hour a day. You might find two such helpful. But I would not
exceed the fifteen minutes at any one time ; you would sink to ordinary
reading, if you did.

I have also ordered for you two not directly religious books, which,
I think, you would find very pleasant for ordinary reading or being
read to :

(1) Eugene Fromentin ; Les Maitres d'Autrefois : Belgique,
Hollande. It consists of studies rhapsodies of carefully reined-in
admiration, after the finest analysis, by a distinguished painter and
master of glorious prose, of the works of men he so nobly recognises as
utterly beyond anything he could ever produce. I will send the book
because the pictures it discusses will, almost all, be familiar to you, and
also because the whole book breaks up into snatches of six to twelve,
or hardly more, wonderfully easy pages of writing. You will often,
I trust, be fit for one of these snatches.

(2) The other book is a little volume of Selected English Letters,
from Sir Thomas More (1535) to Charlotte Bronte (1852), with
just a few notes at the end. I am just reading them myself; they

230 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

are quite excellent for when one is tired, for each letter, or at
least a couple of them, constitute a complete whole. You can
hardly be so ill as to be unable to finish any one of those wholes at
one sitting, or not to read through the entire little volume with the
greatest pleasure.

As to your spiritual question, my dear , as to how you are, not
simply, once for all, at the beginning of all this discomfort and pain, to
accept and will it ; but (as you most rightly feel, a very different thing)
how you are to stand it, to keep on accepting it, day by day, even hour
by hour, possibly minute by minute (I mean, as to the proximity of pain
to pain, and weakness to weakness) : let me suggest to you the following.
I take it that this is precisely the most irreplaceable function and grace of
suffering, when it is at all at its fullest, that we cannot, do what we will,
cut a decent figure in our own eyes j that it rises, emphatically, beyond
a stoic exercise. All we can then do (and how dear and darling this poor
little " all " is then to God !) is gently to drop, gently to try to drop, all
foresight whatsoever ; to treat the question how we are going to stand
this for a month, or a week, or a day, or even an hour, as a little pre-
sumption on our part. We cannot really, of ourselves, " stand " it
properly, for half an hour ; and God will and does give us His grace to
stand it, for as long as ever He chooses, provided we will, according to
the intensity of the trial, contract our outlook, to the day, or the hour,
or even the minute. God, the essentially timeless, will thus and then
help His poor timeful creature to contract time to a point of most fruitful
faith and love.

Your affectionate,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Same

March 27, 1916.

Of course, I keep your case, and its necessities and possible helps,
well in my mind and in my prayers. And since you continue to press
me, so gently yet so firmly, to propose to you whatsoever I may believe
will or might help you to deepen your spiritual life and fully to utilise
the suffering that God Himself is now sending you, I will suggest the
two following closer practices and self-examinations. I need not say,
that they are both intended simply as rough material, or approximate
suggestions for your own experimenting and hewing into shape. I do
not even want to hear your impressions upon them, it all aims solely at
the depths of your heart and conscience, to help the fullest awakening
and purification that God may call you to. Certain it is, that only
such a growing, deepening (even if interiorly painful at first) can and
will anchor your soul in a peace which not all the possible hurricanes of

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 231

pain or oppressions of physical weakness can break you away from,
really, at all,

I would then, first, get my imagination and reason into the habit,
not simply of looking at, and looking for, sin as an offence against God,
but of realising and picturing it as always (except with hardened grave
sinners) chiefly a shirking of some effort, or loneliness or pain, etc., attached
to a light or commandment as it offered itself to us, or a seeking of some
pleasure, relaxation, vanity, etc., attached to the contrary course. Now
the cure, .the only cure, for such shirking of right pain, and for such
seeking of wrong pleasure, is precisely the recovering (more and more
deliberately) of that mean shirking and mean seeking. Pain most real
pain, which comes ready to our hand for turning into right pain gets
offered us by God. Try more and more at the moment itself, without
any delay or evasion, without any fixed form, as simply, as spontaneously
as possible, to cry out to God, to Christ our Ldrd, in any way that comes
most handy, and the more variously the better. " Oh ! Oh ! this is
real : oh ! deign to accept it, as a little real atonement for real sin ! "
" Oh, help me to move on, from finding pain so real, to discovering
sin to be far more real." " Oh, may this pang deepen me, may it help
to make me real, real really humble, really loving, really ready to live
or die with my soul in Thy hands." . . . And so on, and so on. You
could end by such ejaculations costing your brain practically nothing.
The all-important point is, to make them at the time and with the pain
well mixed up into the prayer.

The second thoroughly concrete matter I would quietly watch in
myself is, whether I had not been hard and absolute, " so far and no
further," " I have done with so and so," " I have washed my hands of
him," etc. I have had to fight this in myself for many years ; and since
God in His goodness has (through suffering, saintly advice, etc.) wakened
me up to a tiny bit more of His love, I have come to find that I cannot
be too watchful about this. Gertrud also (that great soul would be
thirty-nine to-day, were she still within our poor little clock time !) as,
in her last years, she shot up, well ahead of her old Father, in childlike
love of God, found herself called to this same carefulness ; and perhaps
the last service she was allowed to attempt to render to an educated
friend, was the trying to get a young Catholic layman to see the harm he
was doing to his own soul as well as to the soul of a priest, thus absolutely
condemned by him : of course, this does not mean any indiscriminate
acceptance of anyone, least of all to the possible or real weakness or
fantastic notions of priests or of others who may have wandered far
afield from sobriety, or from what we cannot help feeling to be so. Only
the absoluteness, the hardness, the dryness etc., finality in such states
of soul is here meant ; and such characteristics will, where not offences
against the soul's own light, be presumably indications of its still largely

232 VON HtFGEL'S LETTERS

dormant condition. Also, if any of the persons thus felt about by such
a soul have happened first to have treated the soul unkindly or wound-
ingly : oh, there is a fine opportunity for the discrimination between
the impulses of our poor untrained naturalness and the inspiration of
God's supernatural Spirit. I would then do my poor best to oust from
my heart all such hardness ; astonishing sweetness and elasticity of
growth in the midst of the bitterest anguish would be the infallible result.
Thus you would end by finding no one except only self. Pray for me
too, I beg you.

Your very affectionate

Friend H.

To Edwyn Bevan

March 23, 1916.

My dear Bevan, .Your valuable criticisms have all been carefully
attended to .the proofs went back yesterday, much improved, I believe.
Especially was I glad to modify that bit about Puritanism and
Industrialism. The point I meant I learned entirely from Troeltsch,
and I believe it very true and really important. But I had put it in a
misleading way very unintentionally, I know. My dear old (maternal)
Grandfather, to whom I owe so very much, was himself one of twelve
children of a Highland Presbyterian Minister ; and to this hour, except
my brother and children, practically all my living blood-relations are,
in so far as religious at all, distinctly Puritan still. I have also inserted
a bit discriminating between Bismarck's means as immoral, because
unscrupulous, and his ends as moral because deliberately limited. You
do not, I think, know (i) that Troeltsch was promoted (last December)
from Heidelberg to Berlin (succeeding Otto Pfleiderer there) ; and
(2) that his wife is of pure " Junker " blood.

Yours gratefully,

F. v. HUGEL.

v To Professor E. A. Sonnenschein

April 18, 1916.

My dear Professor, Now, at last, I come to what I have so long
wanted to achieve to answer your important questions, those written
by you on even larger paper than this on which I am now replying.
Your questionnaire is, alas, dated Jan. 3, 1916. And yet I cannot
find myself intentionally remiss. Since then, indeed beginning shortly
before then, I have had two bouts of nervous exhaustion ; and the last
four weeks, or a little more, have been filled with work promised and
that would brook no delay the completing and passing through the

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 233

press of my little German Soul book, to be published by Dent now, one
of these days.

But first, I have copied out for you some of the advice and directions
given me by Abbe Huvelin in 1 886. I do this in so far with reluctance,
as I am keenly aware how much less living and probing these, to me
winged words and fiery darts, will come to anyone not in precisely the
sore need I was in, at the time when all this, and much more, was said
to me, by one whose spiritual greatness and piercing vision were already
palpable facts for my experience. Still, they may help you, if (as I
expect) you are continuing more and other than literary in your hunger
and your search. Should you find the sayings of a kind for frequent
rumination, pray keep the MS. ; if they only interest you up to, say,
a double reading, pray return the thing, at your leisure. . . .

Now for your questions.

Troeltsch : " der in der Liebe zu Gott zu gewinnende Werth der
Seele " (p. 630 seq.) This is one of the many passages where I believe
T. to be full of two convictions : the highly rudimentary, sleepy,
unarticulated, sense-involved condition of man's, of any individual man's
"soul," spirit, iri his life's beginnings even if this soul then be measured
simply by this same soul's spirit's awakeness, elaboration etc. at the
level of Natural Ethics and Natural Religion only ; and, secondly (and
more characteristically), the rudimentary etc. condition of this same
soul, when it has actually reached this Natural Ethics level, if compared
with itself, if and when it attains to the Supernatural Ethics and Religion.
Since, from first to last, in this ascension, it is the same soul (solicited by
the same God) that is extant, operative and growing, T. can truly talk
of the soul thus gaining just simply its own worth. Yet this worth has
really to be gained from quasi-animalism to Natural human Ethics,
and from Natural human Ethics to the Supernatural Ethical and Spiritual
Life. And since T. is thinking quite especially of this latter great step
and stage, and since this step and stage is particularly attained through
the soul's love of God, of God as central, first, and all-determining
the soul's love of Him being a response of His love for it, both loves
something different in degree, and indeed (in a true sense) in kind, from
the natural loves of the Natural level loves so inferential, derivative,
at the horizon, hypothetical a sort of Kantian affair : therefore does
T. speak of " der in der Liebe zu Gott zu gewinnende Werth der Seele."

I think there is, as so often with T., quite a number of undeveloped
convictions of his lying packed up at this point. Thus the doubt you
express comes perhaps from a third implication of his thought here.
Elsewhere he has developed clearly how, to his mind, God is mysteriously
lavish, apparently reckless, as to the individual and careful of the type,
not only with plants and insects, but even, at the top of the scale of
living creatures known to us, with man also That is : the question

234 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

as to what a plant-seed or a fly-grub is intended, as a race, to come to,
is quite distinct from the question as to what any individual plant-seed
or fly-grub will actually come to, or indeed (under its individual cir-
cumstances) can come to. Each individual plant-seed and fly-grub is
ideally intended, is constituted, for the full leaf, flower, fruit, seed, for
the complete body, wings, etc., of the finished creatures. As a matter
of fact, I suppose only some fifteen per cent, of the individual seeds and
grubs attain to that maturity.

Doubtless the case of man is not on all fours with the cases just
considered. Yet I cannot doubt that T. is right, here also, in keeping
the two questions distinct. Nor, especially if we do accept the scheme
of a substantially good Nature, with its own kind and degree of Ethics
and even of Religion, good of their sort, and certainly not, as such, called
to punishment from God either here or hereafter is there anything
to revolt our sense of justice (if it has been tutored and cured of a silly
doctrinaire equalitarianism) in such quantitatively and qualitatively
different concrete calls, or different actuations of the one full ideal
vocation, of human souls on the part of God.

In writing the above I have had no intention simply to identify the
stages indicated, with particular historical growths or groups. I cer-
tainly believe that there is some connection, but no simple identity.
" Ideal " Ward, the most ultra-montane of Roman Catholics, used to
teach, me and his disciples and students generally, and this as sound,
accepted Roman Catholic doctrine, that any act of heroic service of one's
neighbour or of devotion to duty, carried out by the soul not as a fancy,
changeable to-morrow, but as something greater than itself, and as
something that it would fall away from the deepest nature of things if
it did not do the thing : that such an act is essentially supernatural, and
does not, of itself, require any explicit recognition or clear consciousness
of God at all, let alone Christ, or Moses, or Mohammed. Yet I
believe it to be a sheer matter of fact that such " anonymously " super-
natural acts, are, in the long run and upon the whole, dependent for their
persistence amongst men, upon the great Revealers and Incarnations of
the prevenient love of the Other-than-ourselves, the Other-than-all-
mere humanity of God, the utterly Concrete, the Reality. And
amongst these Revealers and Incarnations, Jesus Christ holds the supreme,
indeed a unique, place.

I have had a plentiful experience of the (quite unconscious) childish
ingratitude of the " simple," " detached," " non-Church " religionists,
as illustrated by the Quakers I have had friends amongst "The
Friends " ever since I was 15. They will preach to you " The Light
that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," as a direct,
absolutely new, experience and a super- an extra-church-or-philosophy
experience of every soul. Yet we know it has taken Heraclitus of

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 235

Ephesus, and Plato, and the Stoic succession, and the Jewish Church
and the Jewish Scriptures up to the Greek (Alexandrine) form of both,
and Philo (the Jew) and his endeavour there to bridge over the difference
between Platonic and Stoic Philosophy on the one hand and the Jewish
Creation and Messiah doctrines on the other hand, and the historic
figure (and immense historic impression produced by the figure) of
Jesus of Nazareth in the little rough Galilee, and the early (but already
very full) Church developments under St. Paul and at Ephesus, and
finally the deeply Christian, Sacramental, Ecclesiastical formulation of
the doctrine by the Fourth Gospel : it has required all this to reach
that " simple " concept and formulation. It is childish ingratitude to
ignore, or to make little of, this long growth of mediations of all kinds.
If souls in good faith, if Quakers, are possible in the real world of
humanity with but little conscious history and with little or no acceptance
of institutions, sacraments, dogmas, this is only possible because this real
world has not always been, has at no time predominantly been, a Quaker
world. It is easy to abstract from, to form a quintessence from, that
rich (also historico-institutional) world and reality, given the persistent,
operative existence and influence, practically everywhere, of the said
world ; but it would not simply be difficult, it would be strictly
impossible, thus to abstract and to distill without those precious but
despised concretions.

jf Henri Garceau

Fete du Sacre Cceur, juin 30, 1916.

Mon tres cher Henri, Je ne veux point laisser passer cette journee,
si belle et si importante en ta jeune vie, sans t'ecrire une petite lettre,
toute pleine d'affection pour toi, et d'intere't profond par rapport a ce
que tu as fait, et a ce que tu as gagne, aujourd'hui.

Je suis si content que tu as fait et gagne ta Premiere Confession le
jour de la Fele du Sacre Cceur. Car ainsi, meme la Penitence le
cote le plus austere de la Religion t'apparaitra, je 1'espere pendant
toute ta vie, comme etroitement lie a 1'amour, a 1'expansion, a la paix,
zi la joie, et de toi, et de notre Seigneur et Dieu.

Car c'est bien par amour, que tu regretteras, de plus en plus, tes
peches, manquements, fautes, et que tu veilleras sur toi-meme. Et c'est
pour 1'amour, afin de le gagner de plus en plus, que surtout tu iras a
confesse. Et, du cote de Notre Seigneur et de Dieu, de Lui, Dieu
c'est bien par Amour, qu' II te touche le cceur et la volonte en la Confes-
sion ; etpour 1' Amour qu'Il te touche ainsi, afin, qu'en L'aimant de plus
en plus, tu sois de plus en plus heureux.

J'aime tant, depuis 50 ans, ces grandes paroles de Notre Seigneur :

" Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes fatigues et qui etes charges, et je

236 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

vous soulagerai. Prenez mon joug sur vous, et recevez mes lecons,
parce que je suis doux et humble de coeur, et vous trouverez le repos de
vos ames ; car mon joug est doux et mon fardeau leger " (St. Matt,
xi. 28-30).

Vois-tu ? Notre Seigneur dit cela aux Juifs aussi aux jeunes
opprimes par le joug irritant et le fardeau ecrasant des regies innom-
brables des Rabbins et Pharisiens. Et II reste tout franc : aussi les
Chretiens auront k porter un joug mais il sera doux ; et un fardeau
mais il sera leger.

Et bien, tres cher Enfant : le coeur si doux et si humble de Jesus
t'aidera, toute ta vie, a porter son joug et son fardeau, et a les trouver
doux et legers.

Ton Ami,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Professor Clement Webb

Oct. 13, 1916.

I have carefully gone through all your proposed corrections of my
" Progress in Religion " article, and have gratefully adopted them all.
I only wish I had been given s/ip-proof ; I would, then, have made
considerable changes and some addition to that page in my 3rd Division
which, I find, you most rightly feel to be obscure and ambiguous. But,
even so, I have, by altering some of the words, now rendered the page
considerably more clear, and, I think, self-consistent.

Your general remarks as to the crux, for your own mind, of any
progress in religion existing at all, have also greatly interested me. But,
after considering your reflections for these last two days, I continue to
find it, after all, not mysterious, that there should be real progress in
religion this, of course, on the assumption, common to us both, of the
objective reality and persistent self-identity of the source of this same
religion. I do not find this mysterious, since now again I am having
a quite young mind a boy of twelve to instruct in religion ; and,
do what I may, to impart to him not, of course, the whole of what
I see as the truth of religion, but even a selection from this whole
a selection kept strictly in conformity with what I am convinced is the
truth of these fragments I cannot and do not succeed in any such
attempt. For I am driven either to look on, largely helplessly, whilst
the little Henri misconceives my adult apprehensions and communica-
cation, if I give them to him just as I have them myself, or I have, not
merely to select, but I have also to clothe the selection in childish
imagery, illustration, limits and deflections of various kinds and then
he understands what I say, but what I say is only roughly connected
with what I know to be the more accurate conception. I cannot feel

VON HOGEL'S LETTERS 237

that, in this, there is any necessary influence of the Fall, but, at least in
substance, just simply a general law of growth of the mind, as general
and unvicious as is the growth of my little fellow's body from babyhood
through boyhood, to manhood. But, if all this is anywhere true, the
same will, surely, apply, mutatis mutandis, to mankind at large, and to
God's self-revelation to this human kind. I had intended, in my Paper,
clearly to bring out that the " Accessions " were, in very deed, of great
difference of value, but that we could only humbly wait for and upon
them .those gifts of knowledge, coming at mostly great distances of
time ; whereas the detailed analysis and theorising of these Accessions
.the Science of Religion .were capable of practically unbroken
development by man, without more than man's ordinary grace and
light.

Somewhat as if the Plutonic rocks, actively ejected at considerable
distances of time each from each, were to consist, in the series of them all,
of very variously precious material, this preciousness being greater and
greatest in the later rocks of this kind. And as if the Sedimentary rocks
were continually being deposited, but primarily not from the resolution
of previous sedimentary formations, but from the material furnished by
the Plutonic rocks and this deposition would, upon the whole, be
finer and finer as the process advanced. There would be progress here
in both cases, but the first would be intermittent, "jerky.," sudden,
incalculable, and yet by far the more important, indeed the fundamen-
tally necessary of the two ; and the second would indeed be persistent,
even, gradual, largely foretellable, yet quite incapable of superseding the
other order, on which it would depend for its fundamental material.
I meant the distinction between " Knowledge " and " Science " in I.
to help me in III. ; with the wording, altered under your most helpful
criticism, I now think these two passages strengthen each other.

Miss Maude Petre's judgment of your excellent little Group
Theories book is as follows. " I have read C. J. C. Webb through
with the greatest interest especially the early chapters and have
copied out two fine pages 187, 188, on the relations of religion to art
and morality a problem often in my mind. I wish he had had the
courage not to make that allusion to national differences in his foreword
'for surely these questions separate or unite us far more deeply than
those of international policy, and I don't like anti-germanism, qua se,
allowed any place in religious and philosophical questions. But that is
a beside the mark criticism."

I shall much like to give you my own impressions also, when I have
finished the pregnant little work.

With renewed grateful thanks,

Yours very sincerely,

F. V. HtJGEL.

238 VON HtJGEL'S LETTERS

To Claude Montefiore

Oct. 28, 1916.

. . . A. E. Taylor's Paper. Yes, I do agree in a general way, and
in a milder degree, with your strictures. Taylor tends mostly, I think,
to pour out his preliminary thought, his rough materials for thought,
before they have had time to set, to grow articulated in his mind. . . .

Taylor's first book, The Problem of Conduct, was, however, a
most able affair ; and now in the Collection of Essays, The Faith and
the War, his Paper on Immortality contains precisely the point (about
the future extinction of the human race upon this earth) which you
missed in the Address, and indeed is also, as to its form, greatly superior
to what we heard from the same man. As to your feeling that the
thing was a muddle of exegesis, philosophy, theology, where philosophy
usurped the place of exegesis, and theology was argued about, as though
it were philosophy : I agree that there was a great lack of careful
discrimination between, and of sense as to the order in which, and as
to the range of, these three several disciplines. But though I entirely
concur as to philosophy having nothing to do with deciding what it was
that Jesus, in simple fact thought or felt about these matters, I do not
think that we can, or ought to, prevent philosophy from studying,
comparing, appraising, drawing out as fully as possible the implications,
affinities, driving forces, etc., of the teaching or feeling, once these
have been clearly elicited by exegesis. Loisy is profoundly right as to
philosophy, where it would lay down the law to, or supplant exegesis ;
he is, I am confident, quite wrong where (as is usual with him) he treats
any and every attempt at a philosophical penetration of the results of the
exegesis, as " metaphysique " (for him, now, alas, all-ambitious non-
sense). And as to the relations between philosophy and theology or
religion, faith (the two latter terms are not, of course, co-extensive), I
again feel we can as truly err by allowing no relationship, as by finding
the connections closer than they really are. I well know that there
exists no directly transferable, no " invincibly " demonstrative argument
or formula for any of the realities, which are the objects of faith. But
it does not follow from this C. G. M. when in his most circumspect
moment does not contend that there follows a sheer absence of many
convergent implications, necessities, norms, ideals operative in all
earnest thought and devoted action as we can observe and analyse them
in actual life, and within our own minds and souls. It is not nothing
that we can really show that all such thought and action assume realities
of a distinctly religious kind ; and that we can further demonstrate how
all scepticism, in proportion to its thoroughness, has to assume, and does
assume, certainties and sacred obligations as to "reality" and "truth"
essentially contradictory to its fundamental positions and passions. Thus,

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 239

here again, I would carefully guard against theology or even religion
dictating to philosophy ; but why on earth philosophy cannot, and ought
not to, study, analyse and articulate the facts and evidences of the
religious sense if such exist and are offered for its study I do not see.

The Place of Judaism. I have read these 29 pages, all of them,
with the greatest care, and, many of them, three and four times. I like
them, upon the whole, almost as well as the noble and touching Liberal
Judaism book, and a good deal better than its substitute. Let me
first underline what I specially admire here much the most of the
whole. And let me then indicate the three or four places where I
hope you may eventually put things somewhat differently : in each of
these places the modification I wish for, is evidently well within the
Jewish conviction and Welt-lild. . . .

As to " the most important differences at the present time, so far
as Liberal Judaism is concerned," pp. 18-20, I will only mark with
warm appreciation what you say of your own personal estimate of the
greatness and originality of our Founder, and of agreement with the
finely wide and wise view of Maimonides as to Christianity (p. 19) ;
and with a little surprised query your finding difference in the Jewish and
Christian views of sin, repentance and forgiveness. I suppose you must
be right ; but I have never, hitherto, felt that there existed such a
difference. The pages as to the supposed, or now obsolete or obsolescent
differences (20-26) I find specially full of interest. . .

As to my dissatisfactions, they are chiefly two. Both, I think, are
somehow deeply rooted in certain habits of your mind, and yet neither,
I think, is in any way Jewish indeed I feel strongly that their disap-
pearance from your works would quite markedly enhance their homo-
geneously religious and theistic force and fruitfulness. (i) I am, off
and on, perplexed by passages in your writings which are so anxious
to be fair and hospitable to all men, and which so emphasise the diffi-
culties and the venture of Faith, that, taken as complete, they, in strict
reasoning, knock the bottom out of the foundations the preliminaries
and assumptions without which both your own and my own, and
every religious soul's, costly convictions and endeavours are just so many
fanatical hair-splittings and quite unnecessary additions to man's already
long list of burthens and of differences and squabbles.

You have the point, which I mean, right, where in answer to the
objection that "noble lives flow both from the Jewish and from the
Christian conception of God," and hence that there is no reason in
keeping up the differences, as of moment. Here where the differences
are comparatively slight you answer, most truly (as a principle), that
" In the long run the purest truth will go along with and produce the
noblest deeds. God, the One, will not suffer a permanent divorce
between Righteousness and Truth " (p. 27, bottom). Excellent !

240 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

But on p. 8, after middle, where the admittedly far greater difference
between Judaism, and pantheism, atheism, agnosticism is in question,
you write as though not only " noble lives may be and are lived " by
professors of these latter isms ; but as though neither the dispositions
leading to, nor the dispositions educed by, such positions had any necessary
existence, as far at least as these could, or should give rise, to any reserve,
any anxiety in a believer. In such passages C. G. M. seems to lose all
the sense of proportion, all the instinct that, upon the whole and in the
long run, there is a connection between Truth and Goodness and Faith
and God which (surely, as a matter of course) he so warmly emphasises
at other times. Let the first kind of passages gain in reserve and gentle
wistfulness, and I shall be quite satisfied, instead of being at times
deprived of my religious atmosphere, or rather of a truly unified outlook.

(2) I cordially accept the insistence in such a pleading with Jewish
Democrats, and there is much there which I like. Only that I do
believe that Judaism owes much also to its Temple and Priests ; and
that I have, quite recently, more clearly than ever before, waked up to
the far-reachingness of the ingratitude and the humbug there is in the
Christian " Laien-Religion." I mean that, if such religion is still an
at all full and forcible religion, it owes a very great part of its worth to
priestly teaching, priestly example, etc. Fact this, and no mistake.

But from p. 16, top, " If the Jewish religion needs," right to the
end, p. 31, it is all purely delicious, entirely food and fuel, to my soul.
Especially the most sane and needed words as to Socialism how, if it
were shown to be the best form of government, there would be no
reason why religion should oppose it. ...

A Henri Garceau

Veille de la Toussalnts, 1916.

Mon tres cher Henri, J'ai beaucoup pense a les Saintes Communions,
et a ce que mon experience de pres de 50 ans m'a appris etre les
meilleurs moyens pour rendre ces actes, les plus saints de notre vie,
aussi pleins de fruits que possible, et pour nous-memes et pour ceux que
nous aimons.

Je voudrais done que tu fasses toujours deux chases, tres faciles mats
importantes.

I . Les soirs d'avant les matins de Communion.

Tu liras, en ton Paroissien (lentement et en t'arretant pour dire a
Notre Seigneur que tu L'aimes, que tu desires Le recevoir, que tu Lui
demandes de t'aider contre tes fautes, de te donner, demain matin, telle
et telle grace pour toi ou pour telle autre personne). Tu liras ainsi
une parti e du Propre de la Fgte Dieu. Une fois, ce seront I'lntroit,

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 241

la Collects, les Secretes. Une autre fois, ce sera I'Jipftre. Une troisieme
fois, ce sera I'fivangile. Une quatrieme fois ce seront I'Offertolre, la
Communion, les Post Communions. Tu comprends ? Pour chaque Sainte
Communion, tu auras ainsi quelqu'lntentlon precise et pour tot, et
pour (Tautres ; et cette intention tu la fixeras le solr d'avant, en lisant
et priant ces prieres. Je fais comme cela moi-meme.

2. Les Matins de Sainte Communion, a 1'Eglise.

Tu feras ton action de graces de 15 minutes de longueur. Les jours
que tu seras avec moi en notre bane, je te taperai sur 1'epaule quand
ce temps est passe. Tu pourras alors sortir de 1'figlise. C'est comme
cela que j'ai fait, oh, combien d'annees !

Je voudrais que tu finisses toujours ces 15 minutes, en priant, a
genoux, la belle priere pour au devant d'un Crucifix done au devant du
Crucifix du Mattre Autel (Tu le vois suffisamment de notre bane).
C'est la une priere qu'aime tant ta tres chere Mere. Et je la prie ainsi
depuis 48 annees. Taches, en disant les 5 Pater et 5 A<ue qui suivent
cette priere, de penser aux belles 5 intentions selon que tu pries pour
chacune.

Oh, que la Fe*te de demain est belle, est pleine de joie, de noblesse,
de courage, d' esprit de soldat de Jesus !

Ton Ami deVoue,

F. DE HUEGEL.

Je t'envoie la Priere devant le Crucifix, pour que tu la mettes en ton
Paroissien.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Dec. 18, 1916.

Here at last I come, my dear, ever kind Bishop, to thank you for so
thoughtfully sending me William Temple's Address to the Educational
Science Section of this year's meeting of the British Association. I have
been thus long about writing, because I have had all my powers taken
up with the incubation of various difficult subjects, on which I had to
write and to speak. And more and more I find that this requires a large
leisure of the soul, and the reading, at such times, to be either direcdy
connected with these subjects, or to be simply for relaxation away from
them.

But now, within this last hour I have been free enough to read
carefully every word of that Address. It is admirable I mean, not so
much in its various technical proposals, as to which I cannot, often,
check him ; but in the broad lines, the dominating spirit of the entire
effort. I need hardly say how entirely I am with him in all this
especially in his denunciation of the utilitarian spirit and ideal which

242 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

will raise its head, more strongly than ever, I think, in many quarters
after the War ; in his insistence upon Truth and Beauty, as well as
Goodness, as the great Trinity of all deep, fruitful educational ends ;
and, above all, in his truly grand insistence upon the need of God,
the belief and proclamation of God, the spirit of religion to run, not
simply alongside of, but through and through all the subjects.

I met him Temple at Dean Inge's " Religious Thought Society "
last Tuesday, when I had to speak on the subject chosen for me, " What
do we mean by Heaven, and what do we mean by Hell ? " (I have just
offered the MS. to the Church Quarterly Review, and I hope Headlam
will be willing to let it appear there in the April number). Temple, to
my surprise, introduced me to his Wife : I had somehow missed the fact
of his marriage. I expect to go to tea with them in a few days, and I
shall then be able to show him what I have specially liked in this Address
of his.

I venture to send you one of the twenty-five pulls, I have just
received, of my Address at Woodbrooke, last August, on Progress in
Religion. They were very generous to me as to the length of the
thing. But, even so, I had to leave out important points. Well, may
the thing be of some little use, in spite of its faults.

A very happy Christmas to yourself, my dear Bishop, to Mrs. Talbot,
to the daughters, and assuredly not least to the two fine Chaplain sons.

Yours very cordially,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Dec. 19, 1916.

I am most grateful to you for telling me so promptly of the great
change in your appointments and official charges. I put it like that,
because I have, of course (with doubtless everyone who knows you at
all well), noticed for some time more or less ever since the War, and
certainly since your camp work -the, not really new, but the unusually
overpowering, orientation of your mind, feeling, will. Indeed, I even
felt it (and the it in itself is assuredly most genuine, divinely intended,
lovable and full of promise) to be, probably till its definite satisfaction,
accompanied by some little impatience with, or a little blindness to, the
as truly necessary, useful, irreplaceable other forms and degrees of the
devoted service of God and man. And that is a further, though a
secondary, reason why, in the midst of my largely selfish regret, I am
really glad, and very glad, that this call has come to you and that you
have accepted it. For thus you will find your truest place and most
precise level, and, after some time in possession of these things, you
will realise how preciously fitting they are for you and how they are

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 243

one of the energisings of God's grace and call one among many, each
requiring all the others.

Very like with Semeria, a good bit like with Tyrrell, you are
evidently a born, or a quite early called, pastoral helper of souls. The
two above could become great helpers of this sort, and grandly save
many souls in this way, and their own selves in and through this work ;
or, without it, they would shrink and pine. So I do believe, very
largely with yourself.

I have to admit, no doubt, that your King's College Hostel work
had grown dear to me for you. It struck me as probably sufficiently
pastoral to satiate even your own large appetite of that sort. Still, the
institution is, of course, directly academic ; and the souls you were
helping there were to be pastors themselves, not simple people. So,
although I have to confess to a pang when I think that not only our
L.S.S.R. still very dear to me but also, and much more, the Hostel
work is to miss you, as far as we can foresee for good and all I never-
theless can and do rejoice with you, convinced as I am that you will do
much good and get much good and that each good will aid the other.

I want, in memory of our friendship and in token of my warm
appreciation of God's gift to you of this pastoral zeal, to find a copy
for you of " Ideal " Ward's Lectures on Nature and Grace, because
they are full of how to win and raise souls through their natural bent
and categories Honour, Fairplay, Courage, etc. A fine book.

How pleasant to see you, the plucky Wife, the dear Children, now
so soon. Mind to let me come and see you all together.

Yours in devoted friendship,

F v. HUGEL.

To Mrs Clement Webb

May 24, 1917.

My dear Mrs. Webb, It is not easy to decide which of you two
kind hosts should be written to, in thanks for all the trouble you both
of you so persistently took to serve and help me in every way, during
these last days. But when I spend a night with any friends, I generally
write my thanks for the couple to the Wife, for it is she who then has the
greater, or at least the less interesting, part of the attentions in her hands.
And so I come, also in the case of Holywell Ford, to thank you both,
most warmly, by a little letter to yourself. I am well aware that I give
fully double the trouble required by younger or more robust visitors ;
and also that, in these times, we all have so much else, such much more
pressing things, to do. I was so very glad to see you both thus again,
in that home of yours which, at this season, is ideally beautiful ; and
to find you both so well and active. It was very pleasant, also, to be

244 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

able to finish my very attentive and appreciative reading of your " Pearl "
under your own roof. I forgot to tell you that a Church of England
bookshop close by here has sold the little book largely. I want it to
get to another, and many more editions, and that Longmans may allow
you to make any improvements that fully commend themselves to you.
The little book has, a good four-fifths of it or more, greatly refreshed
and much delighted me. And now I can look forward to your man's
Gifford Lectures to their helping us all greatly on fundamental
problems. May they turn out as good as the best that we already
possess from him ; and may their form and spirit be as noble as are those
of J. A. Smith's writings, but their positions distinctly not what J. A.
Smith's appear to me more and more to be coming to. Certainly his two
Papers in History and Progress, for the most part, greatly dissatisfied
and distressed me, as I read them with the closest care and every, per-
sistent, good wish for the noble character from which they sprang.
Will you please tell your Husband, with my warm thanks for all his
most pleasant attentions and true help at the little Balliol meeting, that
I shall be obliged if he will send me his review of A. S. Pringle-Pattison's
Idea of God.

The Master of Balliol was most cordial : what a homely, humorous,
human creature that is ! And I saw her too : handsome and shrewd.
Dr. Bridges turned up there, too. And Canon Streeter came to
Plater's Hall and spoke much about various points. How fond he is
of the Christian Student Movement.

Very gratefully and sincerely yours,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Sept. 18, 1917.

. . . You have been kindness itself to us, my very dear and much
honoured Friend, these three days under your roof; and we are
deeply, abidingly grateful !

It will be very good if, at Christmas time, you can come to Vicarage
Gate alone ; better still, if you can come with your fine Edward ; and,
best of all, if you can bring both sons Neville being a figure that is very
much in my mind and heart that soldier-cleric, so virile, deep and true.

I shall not forget Aliotta's book for you, when I get home ; and
I intend also to find for you that noble section in Varisco which
treats of the essential temporality, successiveness and " begunness " of
all that is not God .God, the essentially, not simply unbeginning and
unending but Unsuccessive, Eternal. Creation was not effected in
Time there was no Time anywhere before any Creation, since Time

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 245

exists only as a quality intrinsic to, but present only in, created things.
Augustine already has all this in Books XI, XII, of the Confessions.
With affection, sympathy and deep respect,

Yours ever,

F. v. HUGEL

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Nov. 6, 1917.

My dear Bishop, A little letter, please, about two points connected
with our meeting, next Monday to Friday, at Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford. Neither point requires an answer till we meet indeed the
first would not, alone, make me write now. It is the second point
which I feel I had certainly better put before you already, so that, on
my arrival at the Hall, you can have a word, written or spoken, for me
as to what you consider wise and right for me to do.

1. I have accepted for the whole time, because I think you will
kindly let me come to parts of the discussions throughout that you or
Dr. Cairns will charitably let me know, a little beforehand, as to what
topics will come up, and when, and will allow me little 10-15 minutes
remarks some 3 or 4 times perhaps two such each full day if and
when I have something definite to say. I am, of course, carefully
considering Dr. Cairns' draft report, and look forward to the general
impressions of each of us, and then to our detailed acceptances or demands.

2. I have carefully noted how frequent, and how fairly prolonged
is going to be joint prayer at the meeting. I am, of course, most glad
and grateful that this is so. But it has occurred to me that you might
be willing that you might possibly even like that I should say some
words give some explanation of, or interpretation to, my abstention,
not from praying for our work, nor from praying at those special times
for it, but from joining in the same room with all of you. I may not
do that. But I think I could say some words which would combine
loyalty to Rome with other things which you would all fully like and
endorse. I would not propose this were I to come only, say, for half a
day, and were my absences from the prayers only one or two. But the
abstention, thus, some eight or ten times seems to furnish a natural
occasion for saying things which might actually help on understanding
which, in any case, would not, I think, change anything, or any dis-
position of our souls and minds, for the worse. It is plain, I think, that
if you do like me to speak on the point, the speaking ought to be, either
immediately before, or immediately after, the first praying. But, of
course, on this detail also, I am entirely in your hands.

Yours, my dear Bishop,

with most sincere affection and respect,

F. v. HUGEL.

246 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

To Miss Maude Petre

Jan. 10, 1918.

This season of the year the last three weeks have brought me,
as doubtless to us all, a crowd and crush of work, correspondence and
business of all sorts. And now I am up in my bedroom, laid by, for
two or three days with a chill and some of my old friend some pain.

As I look around me, there is no one (next to Loisy) I feel so sorry
for having kept silence towards so long, as to yourself. The causes are
entirely accidental letters becoming increasingly a toil to me, literary
work pressing on me and demanding an unfogged brain, and then (as
to yourself in particular) the hope of seeing and conversing with you,
and, lastly, the dilatoriness that has now crept over my readings of
Loisy's present-day writings. This last peculiarity comes from no
insensibility to the fine and noble things which, thank God, persist in
his utterances, nor from any temptation to faith from the sceptical and
purely moralist current now so potent there. It is only that I find, as
I get older, I grow more sensitive to such subjectivisms, more sad over
them and with less confidence as to being able at all to check them by
any words of mine. And such sadness means loss of spring for such other
work as one finds does have some traceable effect. I say all this in
explanation of why I have only now read your Free Catholic article
" He that loveth his life," 1 for I wanted first carefully to read L. himself
which, even now, I have still not done. Yet I know well what his
general line is ; and I am warmly appreciative of your delicate insight,
wise generosity, and withal firmness and clearness of conviction and
counter-statement. It cannot have failed to do good if not to him,
then with others. I am glad to hear you have now some longer thing
getting ready ; and I hope to read it placed well in some prominent
magazine.

Then, 2, 3 months ago, I wanted to write to you, after seeing your
Arthur nephew in his Artillery uniform looking more than ever the
very picture of refinement. May he do well, and very well, and be
spared for a long, useful life, after this terrible War is well over ! I
much fear that such ending is still distant. That is a reason, all the more,
for keeping at least part of our activity outside of direct war-work this,
so as to keep our nerve, balance and judgment, without which we can
do but little good anywhere.

I myself am now on a very interesting Inquiry into " The Army
and Religion." We have had some 250, mostly admirably real, docu-
ments from fighters, stretcher-bearers, surgeons, etc. in or behind the
firing line. The committee numbers 22, with Bishop Talbot (of
Winchester) and Professor David Cairns (of Aberdeen) as the Conveners.
1 An article on M. Loisy's book, Mors et Vita.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 247

I am the one Catholic on the Committee ; but we are now still getting
some very good reports from Catholic men and chaplains etc. We have
to concentrate all this into a book of some 450 pages to be out in the
spring of 1920. Dr. Cairns holds the pen for us, but we, 22, pull the
poor fellow about, till we reach a text acceptable, more or less, to us all.

There are also some German prisoners students in theology
whom I have been asked to help with books and advice as to their
study. I have two such men in hand now simple, grateful fellows.

But what is occupying me most is my study on " Agnosticism and
Faith " as exemplified in the religious opinions and writings of Sir
Alfred Lyall ; and then the preparation of a thirty-pages Paper on
" Progress in Religious Thought since 1870 " for the Summer School
at Woodbrooke in August next.

The article asked about by Dr. Prenner is " What do we mean by
Heaven ? And what do we mean by Hell ? " It appeared in last
April's Church Quarterly Review. I was given only a very few copies,
and I have none left. But allow me to send you my " Progress in
Religion " (of which I have still a. put!) and my Paper on " Catholicism
and Protestantism " (although I am ashamed of my photograph being
given American taste !)

With cordial good wishes for 1918,

Yours affectionately,

F. V. HflGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

March 13, 1918.

Thank you for your kind invitation to give you the names of such
things of mine, published since 1914, as I may think appropriate for
appearance just the names in your little History of Modernism. I
give you the little list herewith, first ; but I beg you will kindly not
use it, in whole or even in part, until you have made up your own mind
in connection with points I will put to you immediately after giving you
the little list.

I. i. " The German Soul." London, Dent, 1916.

2 " Progress in Religion " in Marvin's Progress and History.

Oxford University Press, 1916.

3 " What do we mean by Heaven ? What do we mean by

Hell ? " London, Church Quarterly Review, April 1917.

4. " The convictions common to Catholicism and Protestantism."

New York, Homiletic Review, September 1917.

5. " Religion and Illusion " (Religion and Reality). London,

The Quest, April, July 1918.

248 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

II. My points then not as criticism of your undertaking (which
may really clearly meet my desiderata, and which, of course, in any case,
is your affair and has been definitely shaped as you consider best), but as
elucidation of what I think myself, and hence of how I like I hope
to appear in such publications are as follows :

It seems to me that there are two, really (in substance) distinct,
subject-matters which could be described under the term " Modernism "
especially if we mean Catholic " Modernism." The one is a
permanent, never quite finished, always sooner or later, more or less,
rebeginning set of attempts to express the old Faith and its permanent
truths and helps to interpret it according to what appears the best and
the most abiding elements in the philosophy and the scholarship and
science of the later and latest times. Such work never ceases for long,
and to it I still try to contribute my little share, with such improvements
as the experiences of the Pontificate of Pius X have in part only very
slowly come to show me to be desirable or even necessary. The other
" Modernism " is a strictly circumscribed affair, one that is really over
and done the series or groups of specific attempts, good, bad, indifferent,
or variously mixed, that were made towards similar expressions or inter-
pretations, during the Pontificate of Pius X beginning, no doubt,
during the later years of Leo XIII, but ending with the death of Fr. T.
and with Loisy's alienation from the positive content that had been
fought for, also from the suppression of Rinnovamento onwards,
and the resolution of so much of the very substance of the movement,
not only, or even chiefly, under the stress of the official Church con-
demnations, but from within the ranks of scepticism dominating what
remained of organs claiming to be " Modernist."

Now I take it that you are certainly not attempting the fine, but

gigantic, task, of even a sketch of " Modernism " in the first sense, but

only a sketch of " Modernism " in the second sense. And I do not

really see what my own, or indeed any one else's, writings, since that

definitely closed period or crisis, have to do with your subject-matter.

And the point is not a purely academic one, for my mind j nor does it,

I believe, spring from cowardice. It arises forcibly in my mind as

far as I know myself from a strong desire not to appear (it would be

contrary to the facts, and indeed contrary to my ideals and convictions)

as though all that action of the Church authorities had, in no way or degree ,

been interiorly accepted by me. Certainly that action was, very largely,

violent and unjust 5 equally certainly, if one had been required definitely

to subscribe to this or that document without express reservations, one

could not, with any self-respect left, have done so. Yet it is not

cowardice or policy, it is in simplest sincerity, that I have come to see,

more clearly than I used to do, how much of serious unsatisfactoriness

and of danger there was especially in many of the philosophical (strongly

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 249

subjectivist) theories really held which Pascendi lumped together.
And Troeltsch has taught me vividly how profoundly important is
Church appurtenance, yet how much appurtenance never, even at best,
can be had without some sacrifices even of (otherwise) fine or desirable
liberties or unhamperednesses. These two things the actual fact of
a very real, though certainly not unlimited submission, and the duty of
such submission I care much should not be left uncertain on occasion,
in my own case. And a list of my own, or any one else's, work, since
that crisis, given without comment, could hardly fail, I should think,
to look thus " superior " and defiant. Having said my little say, I will
leave it to yourself to act as your knowledge of your book, and of what
I want, will appear to you to be best.

A Henri Garceau

17 mars 1918.

Cheri, Je veux te dire que j'ai bien reflechi a la critique que tu
es " a bit slow." Je vois maintenant clairement, qu'il est fort vrai que
cela, en soi, n'est pas un peche, ce n'est pas une faute morale. Cependant
c'est un defaut, une imperfection intellectuelle, et ce serait une faute
morale, cela donnerait occasion a du peche, si a la longue et deliberement,
tu t'y laissais aller, plus encore si tu obstinement t'y attachais. Car,
vois-tu, cela t'empecherait de bien profiler de 1'ficole. Tu y serais
toujours en retard avec tout les di verses classes et sujets ne pourraient
pas t'attendre, et les autres gar9ons gagneraient bien plus en six mois
que toi en neuf mois ou un an. Done, Cheri humilite et determination,
perseverance humilite a accepter comme exacte cette critique de
" a bit slow " ; et determination, perseverance a lutter contre, pendant
les heures a l'cole surtout !

Vois-tu : ici deja ta religion trouve un beau, un double travail a
faire contre toute prevention, tout ce laisser-aller.

Ton Ami,

H.

To Claude Montefiore

May 28, 1918.

My ever kind Friend, It is indeed good of you to write me so
cheering and helpful a letter and this actually about a book of mine
no more very new, and which you had already read once before ! Most
.grateful thanks.

I have looked up the pages you especially commend, and I am much
pleased to find that they are precisely those which most strive to utter

250 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

the facts and truths I most love and most seek. As to what you
criticise as to Judaism and the " negative movement," I will, most
gladly, insert a note, or expand and qualify, at the place you refer am
inserting your remark in my " Hand-exemplar " in case of a new
edition, and that the publisher then lets me make various changes.
Thanks much then for this too.

Your more general criticism, or half-amused, half-musing, impres-
sion interests me particularly. I cannot but think that it is really
compounded of three strains, and that, when thus analysed, it leaves
both you and me with very solid, objective, and fact roots for our
several convictions. I believe, then, that both you and I do not read
into, but that we actually find in you in Judaism, I in R. Catholicism,
heroisms, sanctities, spiritualities, etc., which are actually present in, and
which actually spring from, the deepest life of these several organisms.
Judas Maccabee, Rabbi Akiba, Maimonides, Sir Moses Montefiore, your
own fine first Wife (I quote only the dead) are/arfr Jewish facts, Jewish
products, I thank God for them I do not read them into Judaism, nor
do you : we find them there. Similarly Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc,
Las Casas, Abbe Huvelin they are facts, Catholic facts, Catholic
products : I do not read them into Catholicism, nor do you : we find
them there, and again, we thank God for them. We can accuse our-
selves, or be accused, at all truly, of " reading into " our organisms, I
think, only in that we doubtless keep vividly alive, and we largely live
by, such very real facts and products, as though they were not only real,
but also prevalent, average whereas they are, doubtless always, more or
less rare. Yet this is, after all, doing no otherwise than does the botanist
who lovingly dwells upon the perfect leaf, flower, fruit, seed the
complete plant i.e. upon what will it be ? well, say, three to five
in every hundred seeds of that plant extant in the world !

And then there is the third and last strain we each think, or tend
to think, our own organism as productive of the deepest or the richest
spirituality and this can hardly be pressed from each side and not involve
a contradiction. Yet I would cheerfully deny that it is as much of a
contradiction as it may well look. Cardinal de Lugo (E.L., pp. 350,
351) teaches so finely the genuine omnipresence of truth and good-
ness throughout all the various religions though this in very various
degrees. Were any one religion (our own) to be held by you or me, as
alone containing truth and power that would, of course, involve a
direct, complete contradiction between you and me. But if (as most
assuredly I do) I am vividly aware of the richness of truth and power
possessed by your religion, and if I am right in holding that (whatever
may be the objective greater or lesser richness and depth between J. and
R.C.) there are such objective differences and degrees extant between
the different religions : then we hold between us two great root-facts,

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 251

root-principles, which lie deeper down even than our perception or
conviction as to J. or R.C. being the richer and deeper. Also we do
well to remember that all those other truths are vividly, fruitfully tenable
only with, and within a particular Church membership and of course
we do (and ought to] feel this, our own Church, to be the richest and
deepest or at least, the one organism which we can manage to apprehend
and to grow by.

Yours ever,

F. v. H.

To Miss Maude Petre

June 15, 1918.

Thank you much for the interesting and touching " Foreword "
to your forthcoming Modernism book, and still more for your very
kind and handsome letter so kind even (and especially) where it is
most emphatic and insistent. I have read both things very carefully,
but think I had better return to you the MS at once, whilst leaving over,
for later on, anything that may, perhaps, slowly arise before my mind
or in my conscience as to the two points you put with such kind frank-
ness. Only last night I returned from a five days' stay in a Home for a
little operation ; and this with my far more painful, and often very
weakening, latter-day other local trouble, which somehow would be
extra active during these days has left me weak and empty-headed.
Hence I do not want to take the absence of any special resonance within
me as to your two points, as proving to me that I will not be finding
them to prove me gravely inconsistent. Certainly with regard to
Gertrud I have not ceased to feel the keenest regret at having put so
much, too much, of a strain upon her than her mind and heart could bear
a strain from which Fr. T. saved her as much, I think, as even
Abbe Huvelin. And assuredly, in a more general way, I have felt and
feel how impossibly difficult turned out to be for many of one's friends
especially the clerics I mean difficult even and especially interiorly
what had gradually grown into second nature for one's own self. And
assuredly again, real scepticism was as little at any time what one wanted
for one's friends, as what one still wants for oneself. Certainly, in so
far as one has moved any soul away, even from the Ctvilta Cattolica
or Benigni, to scepticism, one deeply regrets it, one most humbly begs
God's pardon for it. But all this is only said, lest complete silence just
now should look like offendedness or inaccessibility or ingratitude ; and
is not a clear meeting of your direct appeals. If a quiet and clear light
comes to me, I will trouble you again and tell it you ; if I remain silent,
it will mean that, somehow, none has come.

I am quite satisfied with your decision concerning my letter writings.

252 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

How pleasant if we could meet again soon, spite of our both being so
(variously) busy.

Yours affectionately and gratefully,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Rev. H. Handley

Knoyle House, Salisbury,

Sept. 14, 1918.

My dear Mr. Handley, Only the necessities of holiday-making
have made me a little late in answering your interesting and honouring
appeal in giving you my impressions of your Thomas a Kempis
(herewith returned with thanks). 1

It was not till yesterday that (bundled about, for a few days at a time,
until I came for a little to anchor here) I could browse through these
firm and faithful pages. And now, having let them simmer in my
head over night, I must try and accurately report to you how precisely
they strike me. . . . Perhaps I had better add that, though I have not
directly, or (rather) with pen in hand, been working at the point quite
lately, yet that my having to tackle, three weeks hence, a revision of my
Mystical Element is keeping these questions pretty constantly, in a
ruminant manner, before me.

I find, then, your Paper truly delightful it is so entirely not " got
up," not " clever," not merely literary, nowhere forced, all straight out
from all you are, from all that during forty years you have become, in
considerable part through Thomas's influence itself. But not only is
the Address thus attractive through its transparent sincerity and unforced
fullness : it is also, to my own feeling, deeply true and most opportune
and appropriate, to its time, place and audience. .

Only one point for your consideration occurs to me. Some twenty
years ago Professor von Herding (the very man who is now German
Chancellor) in his Annual Address to the " Gorres-Gesellschaft " a
very extensive Association of mostly lay, and mostly young, German
Roman Catholics dealt he a convinced and " practising " Roman
Catholic with practically this same question as to the all-round
helpfulness and complete soundness of the De Imitatione. He came,
I remember, to the conclusion that a Kempis nobly, and still most
persuasively, embodies the world-fleeing movement essential to all deep
religion, and especially to Christianity ; but that Thomas is much less
satisfactory as to the other, itself also essential element of all deep, or
rather of all complete, religion the world-seeking, the world-pene-
trating, element. That Thomas is unsatisfactory as to this second

1 An address by Mr. Handley on Thomas a Kempis, given before the Conference
of Modern Churchmen at Cambridge, 1918.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 253

essential element not because of his insistence upon the other, the
first, as the more difficult, the more easily forgotten ; nor, again, because
it is well for some men to be called by God to practise a maximum of
the world-fleeing and a minimum of the world-seeking, and because he
specially thanks God for this call and concentrates his care to the utmost.
No. The unsatisfactoriness only comes in where and when he writes
as though the depth and delicacy of the spiritual life was measurable by
the world-fleeing element alone, or as though the very mortification
and Cross the very asceticism of Christianity did not require the
presence, the material and the friction, of the world-seeking element,
and of that Nature which, in its various good levels and qualities, this
element seeks. And Dr. von Herding pointed out that it is this
double sense, or (rather) this single keen sense of the two-fold
movement of the spiritual life which is so cryingly wanted in these our
days. And hence that, though a Kempis can and should continue to
do us the greatest services in feeding that need of solitude, eternity, the
Cross, and God, without which Christianity, in spite of any and of all
enlightenment and philanthropy, is a weak, one-sided, shallow thing :
yet this same a Kempis requires, at least in part, to be brought to and
kept within a more continuously double-pole outlook than he usually
himself supplies. For my own self, I am now pretty often struck with
a certain difference between Book IV and the previous three Books,
in the sense that Book IV (quite naturally) is so largely busy with graces
and with dispositions, given and exercised very consciously within special
times and special places, whereas Books I to III so greatly concentrate
upon getting away from all special times and special places. The two
movements together the tension thus generated between what thus
conjointly produces a true paradox are, I submit, of the very essence
of our training, our testing and our trial. . . . It might be well, for the
sake of others, to make this point even clearer than it already is. But
even if you leave the Paper quite unmodified, I shall most sincerely
thank you for composing it, for publishing it, and for doing me the
honour of telling you how it strikes me.

Yours very cordially,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Rev. Frank Wane

Sept. 1918.

... As to the books of those which I know at all I like the
Faber and the Rickaby better than the St. Alphonsus. But may I
suggest also the study of Ethical (as distinct from Casuistical) books ?
I could descant at length on the importance of this. I am thinking,
e.g., of jiquinas Ethicus, 2 vols., by Fr. Joseph Rickaby : reprinting

254 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

just now by Burns and Gates. It will cost us. or, I believe, at
most i5J.

Non-religious interests, this strikes me as the most important of the
points, in the sense that you have evidently been least awake to it so far.
Allow me to tell a story which, ever since it was most vividly told me,
over 30 years ago, has been influencing me in everyday's life. A very
able mind and much tried conscience, an Oxford friend of mine
(a Scotchman) who from his father's Presbyterianism passed through
Tractarian Anglicanism into the Roman Catholic Church, and who,
though later on he fell away, alas, had, during the years of his R.C.
priesthood when I knew him well, a wonderful, most rare, sensitiveness
to the genius, the latent spirit and affinities of Catholicism in its purity,
recounted the following. As a young man at Oxford he had made a
10 days Retreat under Dr. Pusey, staying all the time under his roof,
living the Dr.'s life with him, and becoming saturated with his spiritual
temper and affinities. He spoke with deep reverence of him, of that
experience I think, at the time of the telling, twenty or more years
back years spent, for the most part, as a R.C. member of a Religious
Congregation. Now my friend said that, comparing Dr. P.'s spirit
with that of Rome at its best, he had come to be vividly struck by one
deep-down, all-pervading, but not directly theological difference. And
that he had come to see with a full finality that there was the point in
which the Dr. and many of his following were (quite unconsciously)
really not Catholic. That Dr. Pusey, at least at the stage of his life
when my friend was under him (and seeing Dr. P. also entirely outside
of Retreats, etc.), was incapable, or had made himself incapable, or
deliberately acted as though he were incapable, of taking any interest
in anything that was not directly, technically religious, or that was not
explicitly connected with religion. And that this was quite uncatholic,
quite unlike the greatest of the Catholic saints, quite unlike the Jesus of
the Synoptists, with all of whom God is the God of Nature as of Grace
a God deeply interested if this be not profane also in not directly
religious things grace things. Two movements of attachment and
detachment, of particularity and of abstraction, of sense and of spirit,
of time and of eternity, of place and of ubiquity, etc. : one thing in and
with another thing : only these together yield the full blossom, the
richest fruit and fascination of Catholicism. I venture to send you my
Eternal Life. If you will study pp. 55-81, 101-120, 301-378, my
present point will become clearer, I hope.

Yours very respectfully,

F. v. HUGEL.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 255

To the Rev. Frank Wane

Sept. 6, 1918.

It was with regret that, a few days ago, on this my hard-earned
holiday, I found among my unanswered letters a note from yourself,
dated July gth indicating, I fear, that you are still without an answer
to your question. But indeed I have been so hard worked amidst such
little health, that my correspondence generally has had to suffer much
intermittence and delay.

As far as I know (and I have been on the look out for them during
now some 40 years) there does not exist any good book dealing exclusively
and systematically with the Psychology of Woman. What I have come
to know of this difficult, elusive, although very real and very important
subject-matter, has had to be gained from incidental remarks or short
passages in various psychology or philosophy books, from the French
works of Dr. Pierre Janet on the " Mental Condition of Hysteric
Patients" (largely utilised in my Mystical Element, Vol. II), from the
description of women in great plays and great novels (e.g. George
Eliot's Adam Bede, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), from female letter-
writers (especially Mary Sibylla Holland, Dorothy Osborne, and Madame
de Sevigne), and, above all, from direct personal observation and, even
more, from the personal observations transmitted to me by friends more
penetrating than myself. As to the psychology or philosophy books
referred to above, I think you would profit greatly by studying the
Chapters on " Woman," " The Family," " Education," " Religion,"
in Miinsterberg's The Americans, English translation, Williams and
Norgate, sold as " remainder " by Messrs. William Heffer, Petty Cury,
Cambridge, for, I think, 6s.

Yours sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Bishop Edward Talbot
(from Baroness Hildegard von Hiigel)

Oct. 25, 1918.

Dear Bishop Talbot, I have been trying to write each day but
have been somehow rather overwhelmed of late what with anxiety,
work and worry generally, but one should not let that be. I have also
waited to write hoping each day I could give better news of him
for days I could have written but one word, " suffering," and that is
hardly cheering for those who truly care in the way you do, you kindest
of friends, so I waited, and to-day really I think he is turning the corner,
and, though he looks very ill, I think there is a little progress and less
pain. That is such a great thing. He has been too wonderful, speaking

256 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

of what a splendid school suffering is and how it teaches one more than
any amount of learning, how he feels these days have been given to
him to get nearer the great Realities, and that if he is spared he feels that
all this will only deepen and strengthen his work by a greater and deeper
experience of the greatest Grace, Suffering. It is wonderful to see his
face all illumined with joy when he speaks of it, though he is so weak
and exhausted. They seem to think that he will soon be able to come
home though with a nurse, and I fear it will be long before he is able
to resume his accustomed life, but, of course, one can hope it will be
otherwise. He sends you much much love and thanks you so much for
your kind prayers, as does your most grateful and affectionate

HlLDEGARD HtJGEL.

To Professor Clement Webb

Dec. 5, 1918.

My dear Webb, your kind postcard showed me .what of course
was most natural that you were unaware of the dangerous and painful
time I have been through these last six weeks, nearly now. I had to
undergo a grave operation (grave, because delayed so long) and I spent
three weeks in a Nursing Home, with really solid suffering, the first
fortnight of the time. Now, here at home, I am, D.G., free from all
pain even the discomforts are slight ; but the blood that is so much
wanted is very slow in returning. I am kept in my bedroom a good
deal in bed (with a little turn out of doors in chair when fine). And I
cannot yet manage any concentrated reading or lengthy letter- writing
they promptly throw me back. But the doctors are thoroughly satisfied
that, some weeks hence, I shall be stronger than I have been for the last
three or four years. So I must be very thankful. It was most kind
if I may say so touchingly gentlemanly and Christian of you to draw
my attention, and to suggest an answer, to Lytton Strachey on that
point as to Manning's dispositions towards his late Wife. 1 I wanted
first to read Strachey before answering. I have now finished all the
Cardinal Manning. I next wanted to see whether Sneyd Cox in
his 2 vols., Life of Cardinal Vaughan, has not published my informa-
tion. But I find not a word on the subject, though Manning, of course,

1 Mr. Lytton Strachey accused Cardinal Manning of a desire " to bury the
recollection of his early marriage." The Baron in a letter to The Times said, on
Cardinal Vaughan's authority, that " the old Cardinal, with eyes about to close for
ever, feeling beneath his pillow, pulling out a small, worn volume, and handing it to
his spiritual son and successor (Vaughan], said, * I know not to whom else to leave
this I leave it to you. Into this little book my dearest Wife wrote her prayers and
meditations. Not a day has passed since her death on which I have not prayed and
meditated from this book. All the good I may have done, all the good I may have
been, I owe to her. Take precious care of it." "

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 257

figures largely there. I now suppose that Cardinal Vaughan left a
memorandum on the point with one or other of the two men entrusted
with accounts of M. corrective of PurcelPs book. But this is only a
guess ; nor do I see why I need make further enquiries, since I hold
the facts so firmly and vividly, since they are all to the credit of every-
body especially M. himself, and since, now perhaps more widespreadly
and insinuatingly than ever, this detestable charge is brought forward
anew.

I am writing to ask Bruce Richmond whether he will let me have,
say, half a column of his Times Lit. Supplement (Correspondence). But,
even if he says " yes," I must await my dilatory new blood I suppose
another three weeks.

Again let me say it : I am deeply, deeply touched and grateful.

My cordial greetings to you both.

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To G. G., a Niece.

Dec. n, 1918.

No letter you will ever write to me shall, please God, ever remain
unanswered shall remain without a reply as careful and complete as
I can manage to make it. But you may have to wait a bit, my Niece, I
never could write with ease not on such subjects, where we should never
write, speak or think except with voce di petto, never with voce di testa.
And now I am still weak, and empty of brain, hence a further delay.

Let me make three or four points of your letter ; and try to explain
these as well as I now can manage.

I . The gradual preparation for, and God's revelations preceding, His
fullest self-revelation in Christianity.

I am very glad you apprehend and appreciate this great fact
a fact, however, which you will have to learn to apply, not only to the
succession of history, but also to the simultaneous present. What I mean
is that, not only was Judaism especially, yet also, in lesser and other
degrees, Hellenism, Hindooism, etc., an historically previous preparation
by God Himself for the fuller and fullest self-revelation ; but this holds
still of those imperfect, mixed forms and degrees of light, in so far as
they still continue distinct in the world. The synagogue here in
Bayswater is still, now, on Dec. II, 1918, a fragmentary but very real
revelation of God and, however unconsciously, a very real pedagogue
to Christ. The little Mosque at Woking is still, for some souls,
a yet more fragmentary, but still real, revelation of God and teacher
of truths more completely taught by Christianity. All this, however,
only in so far as the souls thus helped have no interior incitement to
move on and up into a fuller, truer religion. And nothing of all this

258 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

means that these various religions are equally true (or false), and that it
does not matter to which you belong (provided only you are in good
faith). No : in these deepest and most delicate of all matters, even a
little more light, more power, more reality even what looks a little
means, and is very, profoundly, much. It all only means, that
nowhere does God leave Himself without some witness, and without
some capacity on the part of the soul (always more or less costingly} to
respond to, and to execute, this His witness. And, again, that every-
where, the means and the process are from fidelity to the light already
possessed (yet often difficult to see owing to the agitations and cowardice
of the soul), to further light, which again, in its turn, demands a delicate,
difficult fidelity and fresh sacrifices. Yet, with each such fidelity and
sacrifice, the peace, the power, the joy, the humble fruitfulness of the
soul grow. Always it is a search for expansion and happiness, found
in acts gently costly and increasingly exacting.

2. Only the best attractive to you ; and any, every Church, very
middling, hence dull, repulsive. Thus you do not go to country Church
services, etc.

The touching, entrancing beauty of Christianity depends upon a
subtle something which all this fastidiousness ignores. Its greatness,
its special genius, consists, as much as in anything else, in that it is
without this fastidiousness. A soul that is, I do not say tempted,
but dominated, by such fastidiousness, is as yet only hovering round the
precincts of Christianity, but it has not entered its sanctuary, where
heroism is always homely, where the best always acts as stimulus towards
helping towards being (in a true sense) but one of the semi-articulate,
bovine, childish, repulsively second-third-fourth-rate crowd. So it was
with Jesus Himself ; so it was with St. Francis, the Poverello ; so it
is with every soul that has fully realised the genius of the Christian
paradox. When I told you of my choking emotion in reading, in St.
John's Gospel, that scene of Jesus, the Light of the World (that He is
this, is an historic fact), as the menial servant at the feet of those foolish
little fishermen and tax-gatherers, what do you think moves me but just
that huge life-and-love-bringing paradox, here in its fullest activity?
The heathen Philosophies, one and all, failed to get beyond your
fastidiousness ; only Christianity got beyond it ; only Christianity
but I mean, a deeply costingly realised Christianity got beyond it.
It is really, a very hideous thing ; the full, truly free, beauty of Christ
alone completely liberates us from this miserable bondage.

" Well, perhaps yes," you will say ; "but what am I, here and now,
to do ? " Do, as to church-going, nothing but what you already do.
Only be conscientious and regular in going to your Holy Communions,
whether in country or town, and in going to Church every Sunday
when you are in town. But as to your thinking and speaking, pray

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 259

ruminate, Niece, over what I have been saying ; look out, in your readings,
for what confirms it ; grow shy of any defence of fastidiousness ; pray
to God gradually to cure you of it, if and when you come fairly to see it
to be a poor, a very poor, thing. You rightly dislike Pater's " affecta-
tion." What I call " preciousness." Well, in face of the dread facts
of human nature, and of the rich teaching of history, that church-
fastidiousness is a sort of Paterism.

3. What is the precise meaning of Thekla's insistence upon religion
as primarily an is-ness, not an ought-ness ?

A good question. Well, you see, when the Renaissance and the
Protestant Reformation, and later the French Revolution came, they
in part, only articulated, but also they, in part, each differently, yet all,
greatly, fed and excited a reaction which had permeated the educated
average man of Western Europe ever since, say, A.D. 1300. It was
a reaction away from the (by then too exclusive) occupation with the
object .with things, taken as though apprehended by us without our
minds, and especially with supernatural things, taken as so different in
kind from our natural endowments, as to require a sheer imposing from
without a simple plastering on to the human soul and mind. These
doctrines, against which there came the reaction, are not the doctrines
really held by the Middle Ages at their best say, from A.D. 1 1 oo to
A.D. 1300 ; but they were the doctrines of the later, moribund Middle
Ages, and they were doctrines by which those Renaissance, Reformation,
and Revolution doctrinaires were really profoundly infected as is
always the case with men who do not patiently study the past (also the
more recent past), and who, instead of discriminating, condemn what is
before them as it stands who do not untie knots, but who cut them.
Again, Dear, do you note ? Life taken cheaply -" cheaply," I mean,
because practised and sought outside of, and not within, and by working
through, its entanglements ! Well, now these three (and other)
specifically " modern " movements have been very largely dominated
by a most ruinous, excessive, or even exclusive, insistence upon the
subject your own (or at least humanity's) apprehending powers,
feelings, etc. These subjective powers get, here, more or less taken as
alone certain, as always the first facts in the order of our life and con-
sciousness. Thus a baby will be taken first to feel, know himself ; or
rather, his own feeling and knowing ; and then gradually to discover
an outside world his mother's breast, his nurse's hand, his cradle
soft or hard, etc. all this being really less certain (in itself, or at least for
his mind) than is his thus feeling, knowing himself. You entirely
follow ?

Well, then, even more as to God the supersensible, the Infinite
He is pushed still further back amongst the late acquired, the more
or less doubtful, "ideas," "notions," " perhapses." The regulative

260 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

notions for our conduct, the useful, more or less, working answer to
our real difficulties amongst our real facts. An hypothesis ; " it is
useful to live as though there were a God ? " Kant's celebrated " als
ob ? " conduct is here alone quite certain ; but then, too, conduct alone
entirely matters. Religion is here always directly dependent upon, it
is but the (really derivative, though seemingly superior) sanction of
morality. How different is real life, and the spontaneous attitude
of all unsophisticated religion ! In real life (all good psychologists and
all careful theorists of knowledge are coming to see it) there is from
the first direct contact with, direct knowledge of realities other than
ourselves. Light and air ; plants ; animals ; fellow humans. The
Mother, the Nurse : these are known together with ourselves we
never know ourselves except with and through these realities, and with
and through our knowledge of them. Indeed, it is them we know best
first ; we know ourselves, at all adequately, only last of all. This
knowledge of other realities less than human or simply human is never
a knowledge through and through it never simply equals the reality
known. But it is a real knowledge of these realities, as far as it goes ;
realities which reveal their natures in their various self-manifestations.
I know Puck as truly as Puck knows me ; my knowledge does not
merely extend to appearances of him appearances hiding, and probably
travestying, his mysterious, simply unknowable, essence.

We thus certainly know other realities besides our human reality
(whether individual or even collective). And mark you, if this very
real knowledge of realities not ourselves always lags behind those
realities as they are in themselves : this knowledge, nevertheless, is (or
can be] fuller than any complete and clear analysis of it can ever be. Thus
reality comes first ; then knowledge of it ; then science of this
knowledge.

What about God ? Well, we must first of all become clear to
ourselves that, as with every degree and kind of reality, we always appre-
hend Him only in, and with, and on occasion of, yet also in contrast
to, other realities. Again, that this apprehension and sense of God is
(where not worked up and developed by the great historical, institutional
religions) very vague and general, if taken as something statable in
theoretical terms. (Here again, then, is the difference between know-
ledge and science !) Nevertheless, even thus diffused, the religious sense
exercises a prodigious influence. It is the religious sense, even at this
stage, where it seems no more (on strict analysis) than a deep, delicate,
obstinate sense of Other-ness, of Eternity, of Prevenience, of more than
merely human Beauty, Truth and Goodness, which really keeps our
poor little human world a-going. No great artist, no great philosopher
or scientist, no great ethical striver will ever, fully consciously and
deliberately, admit that what he strives to paint, to sculpt, to compose,

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 261

or to discover or to understand, or to live and to be, is just human
so-and-so-ness, very possibly without any further significance or truth
about it whatsoever.

We have to be truthful, conscientious : why ? Because these
are the dispositions for putting us into fuller touch with realities of all
sorts, especially with the reality of God. Dispositions are thus means
to acquiring reality towards knowing, loving, willing realities greater
than ourselves, in which energisings we grow in our own smaller
reality.

When, then, Thekla says " religion has primarily to do with is-ness
not ought-ness," she means that religion is essentially evidential ; that
it intimates, first of all, that a superhuman world, a superhuman reality
is, exists. The first and central act of religion is adoration, sense of God.
His otherness though nearness, His distinctness from all finite beings,
though not separateness aloofness from them. If I cannot com-
pletely know even a single daisy, still less can I ever completely know God.
One of the councils of the Church launched the anathema against all who
should declare that God is comprehensible. Yet God too, God in
some real senses especially, we can most really know, since, as does even
the rose, how much more He ? since He deigns to reveal Himself to us.
He does so in a twofold manner vaguely, but most powerfully in the
various laws and exigences of life and of our knowledge of it ; and
clearly, concretely, in and by the historic manifestations in and through
the great geniuses and revealers of religion the prophets and especially
Jesus Christ. These latter manifestations get thoroughly learnt only
in and through the various historical religious bodies. It is through
men trained through and through in these schools of religion that all
the more solid and sane insights and habits, even of the vague religion,
get given most of the point and steadiness which, as a matter of fact,
they possess.

4. There is not a line of all the above which has not to be learnt
in careful detail, in lowly practice, in humble daily fight with self in
docility and docility, on and on. We will gradually, ruminatingly, get
the whole unrolled before us. The all-important point is, I think, at
each step to feel how rich, how inexhaustible, how live it all really is !
That is why I am trying to get such words as " Rome," " Athens," etc.,
to mean a great rich world to you.

Gradually I shall give you more directly religious books to ponder ;
yet, to the end, these should be made to penetrate and purify a whole
mass of not directly religious material and life. God is the God of
Nature as of Grace, He provides the meal and the yeast. Let us act
in accordance with this, His own action.

262 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

To Professor Sonnenschein

Jan. 3, 1919.

My dear Professor Sonnenschein, I like to call you that, at least
once, now that you have retired, especially ! 'Your letter, with its
precious friendliness and with its rich, manysided awakeness and interest,
was a most solid pleasure to me. If I am a bit late in answering it, this
comes, in part, from the seriousness of your themes and questions, but
above all, from the fact that ever since the end of October, hence for
some 9, 10 weeks, I have, after a serious operation then, had to sit or
lie in my bedroom, with occasional outings in a bath chair, awaiting the
return of good, thick blood and of general strength a thing necessarily
slow at well-nigh 67 years of age. The Doctor is most confident that
I am going to be more fit, by far, than I have been during these last
three or four years, with their ever-increasing hemorrhages and the
ever-growing thinness of such blood as was left me. So there is nothing
for it but patience, patience, whilst much work is clamouring to be tackled,
and even my ordinary correspondence requires neglect. I am using this
enforced leisure to read, for the first time very extensively and syste-
matically, Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, and Madame de Sevigne.

First let me say how glad, selfishly, I am that, if you did not settle
in London, you have settled at Bath. For at Downside Abbey, some
f of an hour south of you, lie buried my dear Mother and my much-
loved Sister and a very old family friend of us all. It is there, too, that
my Brother and I intend to have our final earthly resting-place. We all
loved and love that fine Abbey Church, and the genial, scholarly, very
English Benedictines there the lineal descendants of the Monks of
Westminster Abbey and with the history of the Order going back to
A.D. 520 ! Our second daughter and I, or I alone, pretty often generally
once a year, go to Chilcompton, for Downside and Stratton-on-the-
Fosse, through and from Bath. And if and whenever we or I do so
again, I will let you know, in hopes of visiting you between the two
stations and two trains. By the bye, if ever you are in serious want of
sympathy or help in Early Christian or Patristic Studies, I am sure that
the Abbot, Dom E. Cuthbert Butler (the author of the first critical
edition of the Lausiac History of Palladius), or Dom Leander Ramsay
(busy on a most elaborate, admirably intimate new edition of St.
Cyprian), or again Dom Hugh Connolly (discoverer of various early
texts and facts concerning Orders in the Western Church), would, any
of them or all three, gladly help with admirable competence. But they
are so busy that I mention this because I know well how occupied you
are yourself, and that you would be free from all temptation to abuse
their, and your own precious time !

But go some fine sunny day to Chilcompton by train, and walk thence

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 263

the easy, pleasant mile to the noble Abbey Church best of all after
writing to Dom Ethelbert Home (as from me) that you are coming :
and you will be delighted with your day with all the art and the
history, all the cordiality and the deep-rooted, Benedictine Pax. Of
course, you yourself might be of great return use to them, with their
flourishing school. But dreams outrun discretion !

To Bernard Holland

Jan. 7, 1919.

... I have been much and often looking at the pictures and
browsing through 2 or 3 pages at a time of your wonderfully rich
and stimulating book, The Lancashire Hollands. What a history !
Your children need hardly go beyond their family and its connections
to possess, during the most picturesque period of English History, the
quintessence of what was at that time central in heroic and fruitful
deeds. I am also much struck and attracted by the skilful (i.e. the well-
proportioned, tasteful) manner in which you utilise various events as
elucidations of Catholic history and doctrine. Edward Conybeare, at
Cambridge, did the same kind of work, even (perhaps especially) before
his reception, but he so overdid it, he took up such disproportionally
large spaces of his historical and topographical works with explanations,
e.g. of what really is an Indulgence, that he cannot, I think, have failed,
rather, to put up the backs of many of his readers. Ne quid nimis !

I will assuredly attend, still more carefully, to your Kenelm Digby
biography that shall be read from cover to cover. There you will of
course be quite free, indeed you will be expected, to treat great Catholic
questions in extenso ; although, especially there, you will be following
K. D. himself, in his very wise preference of exposition and history to
all direct controversy and shipshape theory.

I am, of course, much interested in the three children's progress.
May I say how much I hope that, during the holidays, and especially
in the Long Vacation, you do Latin, especially Virgil, with Verena.
In looking back I note that perhaps no one thing knit me so closely to
my eldest as just the Latin we did and loved together. And I also
note how hopeless it is, practically, to get grown-ups (perhaps especially
grown-up women) to start Latin successfully, or even to do much to
acquire the taste for it. No, now, not later, is the time for Verena, as
it is for my 1 4-year-old, Henri Garceau, with whom I do complete
pieces of Ovid's Fasti, a book I love, and have studied so amid the
ruins of the temples and other buildings he so vividly describes.

Now I must sink away for awhile from active occupation with your
doings, though not from an ever awake warm goodwill for you all five.
May the quintett do very well in 1919 !

264 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

To the Rev. Tissington Tatlow

Jan. 25, 1919.

. . . First let me thank you for this fresh, big proof of your much
appreciated trust. If I may say so when I think of you, there regu-
larly recur to my mind those glorious words of the Fourth Gospel, as
spoken by Jesus concerning Nathaniel. I want to try always to become
and to remain worthy of so precious a trust.

Next, please understand that I clearly see myself incapable of com-
pletely meeting your correspondent's requirements. For how could I,
in any honourable self-consistency, believe and live as I do the conviction
that, after all due allowances considered and made, Rome is, in simply
final differences, right even as against the Anglican degree or modifi-
cation of Protestantism ; and believe in the existence of an Anglican
book completely fair as between Canterbury and Rome ? I can and I
do, of course, learn much and gratefully even from directly polemical
anti-Roman books not only Anglican, but really more still from
continental, especially German Protestant works. But this does not
mean that I find them really conclusive on really conclusive points, but
only often very suggestive of very real abuses and absences in the average
R.C. practices and positions, or again of certain ignorances of fact, or of
confusions of thought, amongst these anti-R.C. critics.

I can, however, give you the names of the books that I have found
least inadequate that I would back up as against certain other, less
just, less competent works.

The four books English, recent, small-size that I have found
thus to be the best are :

(1) Bishop Gore : The Roman Catholic Claims ; Longmans, I
think. (Far and away better than Littledale, although the average
evening newspaper would be sure to prefer L.)

(2) Meyrick: Some Errors of Romanism: S.P.C.K. ? or Mowbray ?
(The booklet appeared first in the eighteen eighties, I think The
man is a bit bitter, and a good deal outside our inner life. But he is
a scholar ; has lived long in Spain ; and really tries to be fair.)

(3) J- N. Figgis : Churches in the Modern State the Chapter
" Ultramontanism." Longmans, 1915 ? (F. shirks the specific texts
and their theological meaning ; and thus plays Hamlet without the
Prince of Denmark. But he is very alert and interesting, as far as he
goes.)

(4) Letters of the Revd. Mr. Jefferson, from Italy. Edited by
the Revd. Mr. Lambert. Longmans, 1917. (More incidental in its
information and free from any direct polemical bias. J. knew many of
the younger Italian R.C. clergy friends of my own, who largely lacked
the finest, deepest R.C. spiritual training.)

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 265

Let me put down the names of the two best, recent, short R.C.
books on the same controversy.

(1) H. Ignatius D. Ryder : Catholic Controversy. Burns and
Gates. 2s. (This is a truly scholarly little manual, originally written
in answer to Littledale, but so full of facts and so empty of rhetoric, as
to fit in even with Bishop Gore. Ryder is quite as gentlemanly as Gore,
and, I think, even more learned.)

(2) Ecciesia. A series o seven Essays on the History etc. of
the Conception. Burns and Gates, 1917. 3s. 6d. (The Essays are
not all equal in value ; but the three or four best are good pieces of work.)

And let me, in conclusion, point to a crucial matter, still largely
sub judice, or rather (to my mind) capable of an all-round adequate
solution, only if a very wide and deep outlook and conviction is admitted
and attained. I am thinking of St. Cyprian, his views and influence ;
quite the most complete and first-hand living authority on all this is
Dom Leander Ramsay, of Downside Abbey, who, I trust, will be
allowed to live till he finishes his great new critical edition of St. Cyprian's
works. This edition will assuredly promptly supersede the very defective
last edition that of Hartel, assumed by many to be perfect. Dom R.
himself admitted to me : (i) that the authentic writings of St. C. are,
substantially, " Anglican," i.e. the Priesthood and the Bishop are alone
the necessary, visible representatives and means of the Church's unity
also of her spiritual unity ; the Pope, in so far as claiming more than to
be Bishop or more than to have a Primacy of honour over the other
Bishops, is not such a necessary representative and means. (2) That
his position was not accepted by Rome, nor had Rome, for Centuries,
taught other than the doctrine of Priesthood, Episcopate, Papacy, being
all three equally necessary to the Church's unity. (3) That some fifty
years after St. C.'s death begin the " forgeries " of Cyprianic writings ;
but that these " forgeries " were perpetrated largely by admirers of
St. Cyprian by men who clearly felt how St. C. had halted in a really
untenable intermezzo ; who in no wise contravened, by so doing, the
literary ethics of their time j and who, by this act, merely attempted to
bring their hero into line with logic and the historic development. And
(4) that the volume of Essays on Church Order, edited by Dr. Swete,
1917, was reviewed by an obviously sceptical, but highly trained historical
expert, in the Nation, in the above sense a sense which R. holds to be
alone adequate to the curious situation.

I must not run on, and must beg pardon for doing so, even thus
much. But you can, of course, if you prefer, send to your correspondent
only those four Anglican book-titles.

Yours with cordial respect and sympathy,

F. v. HUGEL.

266 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

To G. G.

Jan. 26, 1919.

... I am sorry but not a bit surprised that you have been finding
Varro a bit dull even though he be presented by Boissier, who
assuredly is, in no wise, the cause of this dullness. But, Niece mine, I felt
that I must thus risk, now and then, say, once in ten times, to give you
something that will a bit bore you. No : I felt something more and other
than that. You see, Dear, one reason why there are, as I think, so few
at all large, strong minds and characters about nowadays, even in spite
of the War etc., is that education, training of all sorts, religion even,
have been and are so largely pursued systematically as so much beguile-
ment, so much sheer Kindergarten. The dullness, the monotony, the
hardness, the sheer trust as to worth while-ness, the self-discipline, the
asceticism : all this is to count as old fogey-ness : and the result is ?
Well, wayward childishness. When, at 1 8, 1 made up my mind to go into
moral and religious training, the great soul and mind who took me
in hand a noble Dominican warned me you want to grow in virtue,
to serve God, to love Christ? Well, you will grow in and attain to
these things if you will make them a slow and sure, an utterly real,
a mountain step-plod and ascent, willing to have to camp for weeks or
months in spiritual desolation, darkness and emptiness at different stages
in your march and growth. All demand for constant light, for ever
the best the best to your own feeling, all attempt at eliminating or
minimising the cross and trial, is so much soft folly and puerile trifling.
And what Father Raymond Hocking taught me as to spirituality is, of
course, also true, in its way, of all study worthy of the name.

The letters of the Younger Pliny.

These are truly silver-age literature and without the genius that stamps
the work of his close friend Tacitus as world-literature of the first rank.
Yet how charming they are ! How much I hope you will browse on
these utterly leisurely letters and learn much very much, not only
about the Roman character already so pathetically but half, but a tenth
part, aware of the great light and life and love of Christianity but about
the human heart, the human soul what I aim at, after all, as the end
and crown of all your reading.

How wonderful in this way is his letter to Trajan about the
Christians how delightful all his relations with that Emperor, one of
my dearest figures !

To the Same

Jan. 31, 1919.

... I trust that even already you feel what a support against such
windy impulsions, against such wild rootlessness, is the habitual living in

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 267

a world steeped in history, in knowledge of the human heart your
own, first and foremost, and above all, in a sense of the Presence, the
Power, the Prevenience of God, the healing Divine Dwarfer of our poor
little man-centred, indeed even self-centred, schemes.
God bless you then.

To G. G.

March 10, 1919.

You asked me in your last letter to write again soon ; and hence I
do so, as to two points in your reading and in your mental habits generally,
which I am confident you will find of great advantage. I have myself
practised and tested these habits now for some 30 years with very great
fruit.

I. Whenever you study a book which is yours, cultivate the habit
of pencil-marking it, in a small hand, with a sharp-pointed pencil, as
follows : (i) Use the inner margins of the pages, for references as to
words, phrases form generally ; and the outer margins for references
as to persons, places, doctrines, facts and things generally. You slightly
underline, with a short horizontal line, the word, or words that strike
you. If they strike you as to form, you put, on the inner margin, at
the corresponding height of the page, the number of the other page or
pages, on which (before or after this page) the same word or phrase
occurs. If the passage strikes you as to its content, you put on the outer
margin the numbers of the other pages on which these contents occur
again. In fact, you form your book into a sort of Reference Bible.
Thus, for instance, in your Pliny the Younger, any special garden
arrangements, or special points of his Bithynian administration, or
particulars as to the heathen cults or as to Christianity, would be thus
marked and marginally annotated with the numbers of the pages on
which further details as to these several things can be found. Note,
please, that for Translations, one only marks and refers for things ;
and that only in originals (hence, with you, only in books originally
written in English or French) will have underlinings for both Things
and Expressions. Hence Caesar, Tacitus, Pliny, etc., would only have
outer margin references. But Boissier etc. would have references also
on the inner margins, just as Shakespeare etc. would have them.

Then, on the fly-leaves at the beginning of the books that belong to
you, I would, in short words or headings, put down the points as to things
that you specially love, or have most learnt from, in the book, with the
numbers of the pages in which these several things are discussed. And
on the fly-leaves at the end of the same book I would similarly put down
the things I have not liked, that I object to.

You will find that this twice double system of annotation makes the

a68 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

reading sink ever so much more lastingly into you, and that only thus
can you readily find again all the things that have specially helped you.

2. Strive hard (especially now you will be coming to the directly
Christian books) to attain one of three possible frames of mind. It will be
only if you can manage to make the right frame of mind into your second
nature that you will deserve to grow in insight, love, and fruitfulness.

(i) You could try and force yourself to see, or to pretend to yourself
that you see, principles or convictions advanced by men holy or revered.
Do nothing of the kind : you would only lose your sincerity, you would
but prepare for yourself a dangerous reaction, and you would not thus
come to see a single step further than you already see.

(ii) Or (and this is, I think, for all of us the more immediate fault)
you could concentrate on your own, present, explicit not-seeing of a
thing, so as to decide that it does not exist, or (at least) that it never can
or will be seen as true by yourself. This is doubtless the chief reason
why so few minds grow in their outlook after, say, 1 8 or 21 : they are
so busy, pompously affirming to themselves and others, that they don't
and can't see this or that that this is not, and that can't be as to
harden down, for good and all, into their narrow, stuffy little world.
They thus confuse two very distinct things sincerity concerning the
insight they have got, with striving to acquire further, deeper, truer
insight. It is, of course, profoundly true that we get to see more and
better, by being very faithful and very operative with regard to the light
we have. But then, this fidelity and operativeness should be very humble,
very certain that there exist oceans of reality of things and laws
beautiful, true, good and holy, beyond this our present insight and
operation. I so love to watch cows as they browse at the borders,
up against the hedges, of fields. They move along, with their great
tongues drawing in just only what they can assimilate ; yes but
without stopping to snort defiantly against what does not thus suit them.
It is as though those creatures had the good sense to realise that those
plants which do not suit them that these will be gladly used up by sheep,
goats, or horses ; indeed, that some of these plants may, suit them the
cows themselves later on. So ought we to do : not to sniff and
snort at what we do not understand here and now ; not proclaim, as
though it were a fact interesting to anyone but ourselves, that we do
not, here and now, understand this or that thing j but we should just
merely, quite quietly, let such things stand over, as possibly very true,
though to us they look very foolish as indeed, possibly, things that we
ourselves will come to penetrate as true and rich indeed. In a word,
we can and should be sure of all that is positive and fruitful for us in our
outlook ; sure also, that whatever really contradicts that is false. But
as to possible further truths and facts, we will leave ourselves peacefully
docile and open. . . .

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 269

To Bernard Holland

March 22, 1919.

. . . Your Verena's letter is most taking, as much so, though with
certain differences, as was her sister's letter. I am delighted they both
do Latin copiously, with eagerness. This by itself is already a splendid
mental training. Then these addresses they go to are assuredly very
good for them. Father Plater is absolutely at home in " reconstruction "
matters ; they and Retreats for young laymen, especially military,
constitute his particular life-work. He is sure to have been interesting.

As to ... I still dare not tackle the book. But my not incon-
siderable knowledge of the man makes me feel how well-founded is
your impression of a certain current in his mind of a Greek (not Christian)
contempt for the human herd, superiority to its needs. There, Catho-
licism humbly received and faithfully practised say even only a decade
of the Rosary every day would be the cure, the completion of the man.
There is not enough in him of the Incarnation, as a fact, and a force
especially. But then even such great Catholic Mystics as St. John of
the Cross will, in their theory, often for whole pages, write in a (quite
unconsciously) un-ideal indeed anti-incarnational manner.

To G. G.

AprU 7, 1919.

Your letter has set me thinking re-thinking your mind and soul,
and how best quietly to feed and help them. I wanted to write in
answer on Saturday, and then to-day. But my last four or five nights
have been, upon the whole, so bad that I dare not yet write directly
about your very important and delicate points, since, when I am in
such " en-compote " condition, such-letter writing means further bad
nights. I will write as soon as I can. This is only a scribble, lest my
silence were to end in making you fear indifference or offendedness on
my part neither of which would be at all the case.

I wonder whether you realise a deep, great fact ? That souls
all human souls are deeply interconnected ? That (I mean) we can,
not only pray for each other, but suffer for each other ? That these
long, trying wakings, that I was able to offer them to God and to Christ
for my child that He might ever strengthen, sweeten, steady her in
her true, simple, humble love and dependence upon Him ? Nothing
is more real than this interconnection this gracious power put by God
Himself into the very heart of our infirmities. And, it is the Church
(which, imperfectly understood, " dumbs " my bewildered Child) it
i.s the Church which, at its best and deepest, is just that that inter-

270 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

dependence of all the broken and the meek, all the self-oblivion, all the
reaching out to God and souls, which certainly " pins down " neither
my child nor this her old groping Father which, if it " pins down "
at all, does so, really only even taken simply intellectually as the
skeleton " pins down " the flesh. What a hideous thing the skeleton,
taken separately, is, isn't it ? Yet even Cleopatra, when in the splendour
of her youth, she had such a very useful, very necessary, quite unavoid-
able skeleton inside her, had she not ?

But this will be better explained another time. Meanwhile we
will both breast the waves, whether sweet or bitter, looking not at them,
but through them on and up to God, our Peace.

To G. G.

May 5, 1919.

Here I am writing to you, in your new temporary home, looking
out of your window, I expect, upon how much of past history recorded
in gloriously beautiful monuments, poems in stone ! And I am doing
as my first act (after an urgent business card) on this my birthday, this
my scribble to you. I am, alas ! alas ! 67 years old to-day ! Thus,
dear Child you might almost be my grand-daughter do I strive to
attain to the joy of Princess Colombe, in Browning's touching Play.
You remember how she, Colombe, had, up to that her coming of age,
always received countless, sumptuous presents and she had found only
pleasure, and less and less pleasure, in such receiving. So then she
settled she would receive no gifts at all on this, the first day on which she
could order her own life in her own way ; but she would herself give
and give and give. She felt that would bring not pleasure, but joy,
but beatitude. And so it did Colombe finishes her day radiantly
happy. So then, sit on a footstool here, by me, Daughter ; and I will
try and give you not exterior things, but interior things things that
cost one a lot to get, a lot to keep. They are things, indeed, that also
cost one a good deal to give and I can clearly tell you why. Look you,
Dear, there is simply nothing that one soul can transfer to another soul
even at these souls' best with the particular connotations, the particular
experiences of heart and heart, of blood and breeding, of sex and age,
etc., yet it is these particularities which incarnate the convictions of any
one soul for that one soul. Any one soul can be fully impressive for
another soul, only if that first soul comes out, to the second soul, with its
convictions clothed and coloured by those its particularities. And yet
the second soul, even if thus impressed even if it thus wakes up to
great spiritual facts and laws this second soul will at once, quite
spontaneously, most rightly, clothe and colour these its new convictions

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 271

with its own special qualities and habits and experiences of thought,
feeling, imagination, memory, volition. And so most really to try and
help on the life of another soul means, Dear, a specially large double death
to self on the part of the life-bringing soul. For it means death to self
before and in the communication the life-bringing soul must, already
then, discriminate within itself between the essence of what it has to say
and the accidents, the particularities, which clothe the utterance of this
essence ; and it must peacefully anticipate the acceptance at most of
that essence, and not of these accidents. And then, after the communi-
cation, this soul must be ready actually to back the other soul in the
non-acceptance even of the essence of the message, if there is evidence
that the other soul is not really helped, but is hindered, at least for the
time being, by this essence now offered to it. And, as already said, at
best, only that essence can and should be taken over by this other soul ;
and the light-bearing soul, even then, must at once be busy helping the
less experienced soul to clothe the newly won essence in clothing free
from the wardrobe of this other soul.

You see, this now, as follows, is the point which, with the sendings
of books which I begin to-day, I hope you may end by seeing clearly,
steadily, in your quite individual manner and degree. You see, I see,
how deep, and dear, how precious, is your faith in God and in Christ.
I thank God for them, and if to the end you cannot acquire, without
really distracting or weakening that faith, a strong serene insight and
instinct concerning the great occasions and means by which those great
faiths have been, and are still conveyed to, and articulated and steadied
amongst mankind why, then, to the end, I must, and will, actually
defend you against the sheer distraction of such instincts and insights not
actually possible to you. But it is plain that you would be a much richer,
wiser, more developed and more grateful soul if you could and did
permanently develop the insights and instincts that I mean. And
certainly the things I am thinking of their perception constitute
just the difference between a fully awake, a fully educated mind, and a
mind that is awake only as to results, not as to the processes ; as to what
it holds, and not as to who it is to whom it owes that it has anything
large and definite to hold at all.

You see how vulgar, lumpy, material appear great clumps of camphor
in a drawer ; and how ethereal seems the camphor smell all about in the
drawer. How delicious, too, is the sense of bounding health, as one
races along some down on a balmy spring morning ; and how utterly
vulgar, rather improper indeed, is the solid breakfast, are the processes
of digestion that went before ! Yet the camphor lumps, and the
porridge and its digestion, they had their share, had they not ? in the
ethereal camphor scent, in the bounding along upon that sunlit down ?
And a person who would both enjoy camphor scent and disdain camphor

272 VON HtJGEL'S LETTERS

lumps ; a person who would revel in that liberal open air and contemn
porridge and digestion : such a person would be ungrateful, would
she not would have an unreal, a superfine refinement ? The Institu-
tional, the Church, is in Religion, especially in Christianity, the camphor
lump, the porridge, etc., and the " detached " believers would have no
camphor scent, no open air, bounding liberty, had there not been, from
ancient times, those concrete, " heavy," " clumsy," " oppressive " things
lumps, porridge, Church.

There is, most certainly, a further difficulty in this question. The
Church, especially the Church in the most definite sense, the Roman
Catholic Church, has, at its worst, done various kinds of harm, introduced
complications and oppressions which, but for it, would not have been
in the world. I know this in a detail far beyond what you will ever know.
But, my dearie, let us keep our heads ; and let us ask ourselves, not whether
" Church " of any kind does not open the door to certain abuses special
to itself, but, primarily, only whether as a matter of fact it has not been
through the Church or Churches that Christianity has been taught or
practised ; that Paganism has been vanquished ; that Gnosticism and
Pantheism have not carried all before them, long ago : whether indeed
it is not owing to the Church and Churches to the organised, social,
historical, institutional fact and tradition, that the most independent-
seeming, the most directly inspired souls, do not draw a large part of the
purest of their conceptions. Thus George Fox, the founder of the
Quakers, taught that souls are each and all directly taught by God, and
have no need whatever of Churches, institutions, etc. all these latter
things are so much obstruction and incubus. That he himself, at the
end of two years of utter aloofness from all men, was taught directly
from heaven (without any kind of previous initiation by any human
being) that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life ; that God is
Love ; that to live is Christ and to die is gain, etc. He naively admits
that, during all that time, he had his Bible with him, reading, reading it,
all those 24 months. And how that, after those entirely individual,
entirely direct, utterly new revelations, he did find teachings in St.
John's Gospel and Epistles, yes, not unlike his direct revelations ; but
these revelations were not in any way suggested by those Bible passages,
for these Fox's revelations were real, were revelations from the living
God to his, F.'s, living soul and how can something living be suggested
by something dead ? How can the Spirit be tied to the Letter ? How
can anything but God Himself, and my own soul itself these two
working and responding directly in and to each other how can or could
they be otherwise than stopped or stifled by anything not themselves
by any person or thing other than just themselves in this their unique
intercourse ?

Now all this does not prevent Fox from having been a very spiritual

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 273

man, and his good faith is transparent. Yet equally clear is the utter
rottenness of his psychology and the childish simplicity of his conception
as to the methods actually employed by God. For those beautiful
thoughts, those great facts as to God and as to Christ, were they less
beautiful, less great because they had been perceived and expressed already
1500 and more years before Fox ? And were they less Fox's own,
was he less free in uttering them, because they had been awakened in
himself, so utterly freshly, by those lovers, thinkers, and writers of the
past ? Nor would it be adequate to reply : " Ah, well, at least the
individual Fox was awakened by, or on occasion of, another individual ;
such two individuals do not make a Church, still less does that one
individual (the Johannine writer) constitute a Church." Such a reply
would be poor indeed. For the Fourth Gospel is already a Church
Document it already simply articulates the faith and love of the
Christian Community some 60 years after our Lord's death. And
even the whole New Testament, or also the oldest parts, even the
unique life and love of Our Lord themselves ; even these again pre-
suppose a Church, a Community, a tradition, etc. ; in which Jesus
was brought up, and which He learnt from and obeyed till He trans-
cended it, transforming and fulfilling all that was good in it.

You may ask, my Niece, what precisely I am driving at ? Do I want
to make you an R.C. ? Why, of course, no, dear, I am busy, not with
trying to get you to turn actively " Churchy " even. I am hoping
only to get you gradually to see the huge, unique, irreplaceable good
that you, as we all, owe to the Church. Even if (which I hope may
never happen) you came to find it somehow impossible to keep up as
much of Church practice (Holy Communion etc.) as, thank God, you
practise now : even then you would (if I succeed) feel a deep, deep
gratitude to the Church something like, though considerably more
than, you will come to feel towards the ancient Rome and ancient
Greece. Want of such insight and such gratitude towards any of
these forces constitutes always, I am sure, a very real limit and weakness.

Further back, I said that the main point to consider was, not the
harm done by Churchmen at their worst, but the special function and
work of the Church at its best. You see, this is but the same principle
which comes continually into everything. Take marriage. What a
unique means of training the soul ; how magnificent is its ideal ! Yes,
but nothing is, of course, easier than to collect volumes full of instances
of infidelity, tyranny, non-suitedness, etc. A good lawyer-philanthropist
friend of mine has enthusiastically put forward the example of certain
American States which allow 1 6 valid reasons for Divorce.

Take Parenthood: what a unique relation, what an irreplaceable
means for the mind's and soul's growth. Yes, but the volumes full of
misguided parental affection or folly or tyranny ? So with the State,

274 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

so with Art, so with Science, so with all that the hands of man touch
at all .hands which so readily soil even what they most need, what
is most sacred. But notice how the Church, State, Family, Children,
the Marriage Tie ; these, and other right and good things not only
possess each its Ideal, unattained outside of and above it. No, no :
they each possess within them more or less of that Ideal become real
they each and all live on at all because, at bottom, they are necessary,
good come from and lead to God, and really in part effect what they
were made for.

To G. G.

Clonboy, Englefield Green,

June 12, 1919.

I have been revolving your letter its points in my old head and
heart, and the following is the upshot. I begin with the books and end
with direct life.

1 . I am glad you have read Paradise Lost, and still more glad that
you do not like it. Rabindranath Tagore, at Vicarage Gate, told me
that all his life he had wondered why Englishmen considered Milton a
poet at all ; for that to be a poet is not, primarily, to have a keen sense
for poetical forms, but to be penetrated by a love of all things good
in Nature, as vehicles and presentations of the spiritual realities -that
an innocent sensuousness is a sine qua non for all real poetry. But that
Milton is, in his heart of hearts, doubly cold, doubly hostile to Nature
good Nature. That he is incurably a Puritan ; and then has also taken
over the cold side of the Renaissance. I think myself that you are more
just than Tagore, and that those exquisite early and short pieces are
true poetry, are innocently sensuous. I feel the same with Lycidas
and Comus. But T. is right as to the poet in Paradise Lost
all but grand bits, such as the invocation of light, his blindness, the
description of Eve in Paradise, etc. The fact is that Puritanism is
neither natural (in the good sense) nor (really) Christian.

2. As to Shakespeare, he is, indeed, an utter marvel of richness.
But, in S., I always end by feeling a limit in a way the very contrary to
M.'s limit yet a grave limit still. S. is a true child of the Renaissance
also in the Renaissance's limitation. He has not got that sense not
merely of life's mystery, etc. .but of the supernatural, of the other Life,
of God, our Thirst and our Home >he has not got what Browning
on these points has so magnificently. No dying figure in Shakespeare
looks forward ; they all look backward ; none thirst for the otherness
of God ; they all enjoy, or suffer in, and with, and for, the visible, or
at least, the immanent alone. When the soul is fully awake, this is
not enough ; it only arouses, or expresses, man's middle depths, not his
deepest depths. It is not anti-Christian ; it is even Christian .more

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 275

Christian, really, than Milton as far as it gets ; but it does not reach the
ultimate depths, it never utters the full Christian paradox and poignancy.

3. As to the Martyrs, I well understand, dear, that you have had
enough of them, at least for the present, yet I do not regret sending you
the Allard. I am profoundly convinced that we can never be impressed
too much by the reality, the transforming, triumphing power of religion
by the immense factualness. And, for the purpose, I know nothing
more massively impressive than those first three centuries of persecution.
But it is literature, doubtless, more for a mature or elderly man, rather
than for a young woman. And you will be able to feed the astringent
emotions (alongside of the sweet) in other ways. This, of course, means,
that I hold these astringent emotions and moods this apparent hardness,
this combat and concentration, this asceticism, to be, in the right place
and proportion, an absolutely essential constituent of the Christian
outlook. Of course, a child can and ought to have only a very little,
and a peculiar kind of it ; a woman ought to find and to foster a form
and amount of it, different from a man's needs. But where this element
is not, there is not authentic Christianity, but some sentimental humani-
tarianism, or some other weakening inadequacy.

4. I had got you your next parcel made up of books about Gnosticism
and the Church's immortal victory in the first two centuries over
that many-headed monster, so live again amongst us. I had got passages
from the chief Gnostics for you in English ; such Pagan Magic writers
and attempters of a Gnostic- Magic substitute for Christianity as Apuleius
and Philostratus (life of Apollonius of Tyana). And I had finished up
with Ibsen's grand, little-known play, picturing these last attempts
for those times of Paganism in competition with Christianity. I had
all this ready, again, to bring home the reality, the irreplaceableness of
Christianity ; and to protect you, through the self-expansion we can
attain by History, from the Esoteric Buddhists, the Spiritualists, etc.,
the Gnostics of our day, very small descendants of those ancient
Gnostics, who, bigger though they were, could not prevail in the fierce
testing of human life.

But I see you are hungering now, not for the knowledge of things
to avoid, but for the further revelation of realities to love. And so
I am putting this Gnostic packet away for the present. I will take it
when we have done the Pagan and Christian Greek things ; as a matter
of fact, Gnosticism was primarily Greek, though it broke out as a spiritual
epidemic, at its worst, in the late Roman Empire.

5- (i) The Octavius of Minucius Felix.

I think this is the finest Latin Christian pre-Constantinian docu-
ment, as so much literature. It is touching and helpful also spiritually ;
but as to depth and power there exist greater things in that range of
documents, e.g. Tertullian. But then Tertullian is disfigured with

276 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

every kind of vehemence, want of proportion, bad taste in details,
sometimes even in great things. Whereas M.F. is so beautiful through-
out his form, that Boissier loves him for it. You remember B.'s fine
analysis of the Octavius ? Read, then, this short piece, very carefully,
ruminatingly, at least twice. The Introduction first of all, and at the
end of the second reading.

(ii) Turmel's Tertullian.

Turmel is an excellent initiator into Tertullian, and will give you,
I think, a vivid sense of what a genius, what a dazzling variety, what
a harshness and impossibleness that poor great mind, that vehement,
burning and largely burnt-up soul, was in real life, and is still in his
very difficult, largely repulsive, but astonishingly live books. You
will never forget, will you, that Rome .that official Christianity
deliberately and continually refused to accept Tertullian's tone, or
to endorse his Rigorism. He ranks as the greatest of the Montanist
heretics. And most undoubtedly Rome was right in all this, and T.
was wrong. Yet it remains simultaneously true, that Tertullian's
is the first mind and personality of the first rank, classable as Christian,
indeed heroically Christian in intention, that God gave or permitted
to mankind, after the long break since St. Paul. Our Lord, the
Unmatched, the Inexhaustible God with us, surrounded by little,
little men. And then, promptly, one great follower, St. Paul. And
then a long break, followed by a second great follower, Tertullian.
And then a shorter break, and a third great, indeed a still greater, a far
mellower, a far more fully Christianised Christian man, St. Augustine.
You will at first hate Tertullian as much as the Milton of Paradise
Lost perhaps. Tertullian, a lawyer by training, and a hard, fierce,
African Roman by temperament, .with all the tendency to excessive
reaction and vigilant rigorism of most converts especially of converts
from the moral corruptions of that late Paganism, can seem can be
along certain of his most numerous sides as legalistic, as mercenary,
as cold, etc., as Milton. Yet all this surrounded by so much more, and
the whole as part of a personality full of vehement exuberance a per-
sonality, which, though it can shout unjust reproaches and apparent
arrogances, is, at bottom, pathetic in the sense of its own unloveliness
so in his little treatise on " Patience," a virtue, he confesses at starting,
which he, the vehement, the turbulent, never possessed. Please note,
too, that Tertullian stands quite unique in the way he has always been
treated by the Official Church. A man once declared a heretic, and
his writings were shunned by all but a few orthodox scholars, and his
writings would never be used with admiration and for acceptance.
But Tertullian was taken by St. Cyprian as his, the Bishop's, daily
spiritual reading ; and, indeed, St. C.'s own writings are full of
reminiscences of those of T. And even in our recent times, upon the

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 277

whole more strict amongst the orthodox than were those earlier
centuries, this same privileged treatment remains : there exists, e.g.,
a three-volume Selections from Tertullian, made ready for Sermons
throughout the Sundays and holidays of the year : this by a French
priest intheeighteen-forties or eighteen-fifties, with full Episcopal appro-
bation. Why has T. always enjoyed this quite exceptional treatment ?
It is, I think, not so much because he was the first to coin a whole
string of striking technical terms, which were taken over permanently
by Christian, especially by Latin Christian theology ; but because T.'s
errors were mostly excesses in opposition to the natural, the first im-
pulses of the average man or woman 'thus those errors were, upon
the whole, harmless.

(iii) Tertullian, English Translations of some of his chief writings,
in the Library of the Fathers, Vol. I. Although Turmel will
already have given you well-chosen, well-translated extracts from T.,
I should like you to read, in this (very fine) English Translation, the
great Apologeticus so amazingly rich in vivid pictures and in vehement
emotions and the beautiful, deep, Testimony of the Christian Soul.
I have deliberately withheld from the packet a good English translation
of the Testimony of the Martyrs, and (again) of his Testimony of
the Christian Soul a little volume like the Minucius Felix. I have
so acted, because I do not want to give you a second Tertullian volume,
unless and until I find that you are more helped than repelled by the
fierce African. Of one thing I am sure : no one can get much out of T.
unless the person, man or woman, be thoroughly self-disciplined, self-
trained in the fruitful art and virtue of gathering roses amidst thorns,
and of discerning jewel eyes in a toad's head. I want my Niece to end
by becoming such a discriminator ; how weary I am of the lumpers,
the whole-hoggers \ I will not press you, over the Tertullians, as to
the amount of reading of him. You may find even a single reading
of the Turmel volume, as of the Apologeticus and Christian Soul
in the Library of the ^Fathers volume, more than you can stand. Or,
again, you may discover refreshing oases in that scorching desert, and may
be drawn on by a genius, as certainly a genius as he requires bucketfuls
of expansion and of sweetness to render useful and palatable even thimble-
fuls of his rigidity and bitterness. If you are thus fascinated, a double
reading of Turmel, and a double reading of the English volume (at
least of the two pieces proposed) would certainly not be too much.

(iv) Palladius' Lausiac History of the Early Monks.

You will think that I have never done with astringency ! Just you
only get inside any one of the deeper and deepest men souls, when fully
awakened by grace, and you will perhaps marvel at, you will certainly
have to note, the large presence in very various forms, no doubt of
such astringency ; so, if it be only to understand the history of men's souls,

278 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

a considerable acquaintance with such pickles and prickles, such salt
and such mustard, is necessary. Besides as to this Palladius book, in
particular, it admirably balances and completes your outlook upon
dying Paganism and upspringing Christianity in the decadent Roman
Empire. Also, you can hardly understand well the St. Jerome and
the St. Augustine volumes, of the packet to follow, unless you know
something about St. Anthony and his companions. I shall be interested
to hear whether my little old child manages to discern, in those often
strange scenes, a necessary, abiding element (capable of all sorts of forms
and of degrees) of Christianity itself. There is still a strange (at bottom
childish) intolerance abroad as to the ascetical element ; but men the
deeper ones are again coming to see what they had far better never
ceased to see so Prof. William James, so too Prof. Ernst Troeltsch
both men of the largest outlook. If you like Palladius, read him twice ;
if you don't, put him by till you can appreciate him.

To G. G.

July 3, 1919.

Two facts or laws the first that our ideal must be, in and for the
long run, a genial, gentle, leisurely expansion >no shaking of the nerves,
no strain, no semi-physical vehemence, no impatient concentration.
Suffering and involuntary strain may come to us ; but all this will,
where good be upborne and expanded into Peace and humble Power
if we keep little in our own eyes, gently watchful and united to God,
in love. The second fact or law is that nothing we may feel, think,
will, imagine, however spiritual, however real spiritually, but has, in
this our earthly life, to be paid for by the body. True, the joy of it will
even do our body good ; still, a certain subtle unintentional strain has
been introduced into our nervous system. The same in its degree and
way would be true if we took systematically to music or mathematics.
There is no necessary harm in this, and no means of fully avoiding it.
Yet it is important we should be aware of the fact. For such awareness
will help to give us a certain sobriety and moderation in all this our
emotional life a sobriety and moderation which will, if wisely managed,
greatly add to and aid that fundamental Christian virtue, creatureliness.
And lastly Consolation is sooner or later followed by Desolation ; and the
latter is, when and where God sends it (and we have not ourselves brought
it on ourselves by laxness and dissipation), as true a way to God, and
usually a safer one than Consolation. 'Day and night, sunshine and
storm, union and aloneness 'both are necessary, sooner or later, Sweet.
But of course it is for God, for Him alone, to know and apportion these
vicissitudes to each soul, and certain it is that it is of much help to have

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 279

some older, more experienced soul handy .who can and will, if and
when we get into Desolations, cheer us on by the reminder of the
former Consolation and still more by the great fact, that only through
such vicissitudes, through fidelity in them, can we grow strong and
deep in God and for Him.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Clonboy, Englefield Green, Surrey,

July 8, 1919.

My very dear Bishop, Hildegard found, in yesterday's Daily

Telegraph, the death of Mrs. Edward Lyttelton

How dumb and helpless we stand, or seem to stand,

before it ! What an impertinence, what conceit, it appears to be, if
and when we utter more than a groan, a sigh, a tear !

In the case of this your Brother-in-law a man whom, I know, you
love most deeply and very tenderly a man, again, whom our good friend
Bernard Holland (doubtless with countless other Etonians) has felt with
and for, so keenly, in all his previous troubles this most stunning blow
has come on top of a great, though quite different, previous trial. I was
not, in connection with that past ordeal, able to see eye to eye with him ;
yet how deeply one felt, at once and throughout, the utter unworldli-
ness, the lofty striving after justice, the moral and spiritual nobility of the
man, and indeed of this very action of his, problematical as, outside of
his own consciousness and motivation, it might seem to oneself to be !
. . . And now, alas, this !

. . . May he, fine, deeply tried man, find peace and a mainstay,
even in this terrible trouble ! I will, and I do, join my poor prayers
with yours, to that effect.

To G. G.

Aug. 7, 1919.

i. St. jfugustine. I cannot exaggerate the gain that I think you
will derive from feeding for years upon the Confessions. They more
than any other book, excepting the Gospels and the Psalms, have taught
me and I believe they will teach you, will penetrate and will colour
every tissue of your mind and heart as to four things especially.

( I ) Seriousness. The average, conventional, latter day, "enlightened 5 '
etc. outlook as to moral responsibility, purity, humility, sin, is just so
much childishness compared to the spirit that breathes in those death-
less pages. That entire way of recording one's own or other lives, as

280 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

though they were just so many crystals, or at most so many plants as
though they could not, in the given circumstances, have been other
than in fact they were : all that sorry naturalism and determinism, with
its cheap self-exculpation and its shallow praise (because also shallow
blame) of others : all this is nobly out-soared, is obviously nowhere in
that deep manly world of St. Augustine.

(2) Reality, Distinctness, Prevenience of God, our Home. This
again, how little we are recognising it ! And how this fundamental
fact pervades St. A. ! It is because of this mighty fact, ever taken in
all its seriousness, that the soul is left rock-based, serene, unshaken ; even
though it wander far away from God, its Home. Yet that Home
continues ready to receive it back.

(3) The Church, the Community, the Tradition, the Training School
of Seekers after, of Souls found by God and Christ. This great fact
overlooked nowadays as fact, and the other two St. A. has them all
three in deepest operation each requiring, supplementing, strength-
ening the other.

(4) Our Dead ourselves when dead. St. Augustine is the finest
antidote to our prevalent weakness here again. What soul ever owed
more to another than A. to Monica ? Can there have been many
souls more holy than Monica's ? And have there been many, come
back from more deadly sins and errors, than Augustine ? Yet with all
she was, with all her saintly life and glorious death, all still vividly before
him, Augustine quietly records her frailties and prays for her, .and begs
all who read him throughout the ages to pray for her, for the forgive-
ness of her sins. In this way even Monica becomes, if I may speak in
homely fashion, not a lobster-pot, but a springboard, not a blind alley
or a terminus, but a starting-point and a spur to seeing, willing, doing
even further than she whilst she was in this life.

2. God. I shall be glad if on this point you can and will develop
two distinct currents of conviction and emotion : the two together will
give you a deep growing faith. By all means concentrate upon the
lights that may come to you, as it were incidentally and as background,
in and through your prayers of Church Services, Prayer of Quiet
and Holy Communions ; and leave alone definitions of Him and clear,
reasoned articulations of your faith in, of your conceptions of Him.
Good, excellent provided you not only respect for others, but you
interiorly reverence as indirectly but most operatively necessary for
yourself, the great positive conclusions of the greatest thinkers, theolo-
gians, saints, the great definitions of the Church concerning God. I
mean, learn to shrink away from the childish attitude of Schiller, in his
epigram that he refuses to belong to any religion, because of his pro-
found religiousness, or of Goethe in his Faust that it does not matter
what we think God to be, what we say of Him that it all equally

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 281

affirms and equally denies Him. I cannot exhaustively know, I cannot
adequately define, even a daisy, still less Puck. Still less you. Does it
follow that I cannot know, in various degrees, really know, a daisy, Puck
still less you that it does not matter how I conceive them, that this
conception is not ever so much more penetrating, ever so much more
true, than is that conception ? You know Gibbon's far too influential
gibe at the Arian Controversy that it was all a silly squabble con-
cerning a diphthong as to whether Christ was "Homoousios"= same
substance with the Father or " Homo/ousios " = of similar substance
with the Father. Gibbon thus confounded rich, far-reaching live differ-
ences, with their ultimate reduction to technical terms. You might as
well declare that a controversy turning upon one milliard pounds sterling
that presence or absence was but a wrangle over the numerical sign
the vertical stroke of I; since, on the one side, men wrangled
"000,000," and on the other side men wrangled " 1,000,000." Of
course all great issues can intellectually be reduced to such beggarly
seeming symbols ; and, in this reduced form, they can only appeal to
those who know them in their living fulness and operativeness. But
it is a transparent piece of clap-trap to decide offhand, from such reduc-
tions, that this or that one is worthy of all respect because it covers great
riches of fact, and that another deserves all contempt as a mere empty
formula. My child will then just simply love and serve God in and
through her prayers, her joys, her sufferings her Church and her
Communions her children and her dear ones all but she will not
tilt at, she will not treat lightly definitions however dry-seeming and
abstract.

Two great laws I am convinced they are of and in our little
earthly lives and probation. The one fact and law is, how unequipped
are young people, say, up to 30 at the earliest, for any final negative
decision as to religion. I mean definite, institutional religion ; and
therefore how heavy is the responsibility of Parents and seniors if they
provoke, if they give ready occasion to, the young, to any indiscriminate
revolt against such definite institutional religion. Such seniors may have
the deepest experience of what such definite, institutional religion means
in and for their own lives, but they ought simultaneously to make clear
to themselves that this their own formed conviction has been an affair
of time, and that they must not presuppose it as extant in the young, or
as simply transferable to the young by command or even by careful
teaching. This, of course, in no wise means that children and young
people should not be taught some religion, should not be wisely trained
in some religious (institutional religious) convictions and habits. It
only means that at every step you should remain conscious of the in-
evitable, the right of difference between these young things and your-
self and that we will have gained a great point if they leave your hands

282 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

with only a little definite religion, but with a sense that there may well
be more in it than they can, so far, see for themselves.

The second great fact or law of human life is that good faith and
the effects of our view and decisions (upon ourselves and others) are
strikingly incommensurate. A child is taken over a factory in the
best good faith it puts its hand into the machinery its good faith in no
wise saves it from its own quite sincere but entirely ignorant action.
No doubt that, in more purely spiritual matters, good faith does more or
less neutralise some of the effects of inexperience, precipitation, etc.
but it does not neutralise them entirely. All this then means that we
will strive to make the young feel more and more that sincerity is indeed
a one, most necessary virtue for them ; but that docility is quite as
necessary a virtue.

To Bishop Edward Talbot

Aug. 25, 1919.

My dear Bishop, I have revolved these various texts for the
Whitehall Cenotaph in my old head, and I think that the text from
Revelation is really the most appropriate of all texts within the New
Testament. It is certainly not the most beautiful, nor the most authori-
tative. And I should dearly love to find Protestant England at one
with the King of the Hedjas and with the Chief Rabbis of Paris and
London, not to speak of the Russian Church authorities or of the Roman
Catholic Church in this as in all other countries, accepting, requiring
prayers for these Dead. I would, in that case, propose the text in the
Second Book of Maccabees : " It is a holy and wholesome thought to
pray for the dead. ..." But, of course, as matters stand, this would
never do.

Your gratefully affectionate old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Professor Clement Webb

Clonboy, Englefield Green,

Aug. 15, 1919.

My poor old conscience was anyhow pricking me on and on, and
more and more, as to my non-response to your delightful, most welcome
long letter of July 23rd ; when, behold, on the very day I had fixed as
the one when your turn had come, I receive a further communication
from you a note about pleasant young Dr. Brilioth.

I do not, in spite of the above tragic picture, feel I could really serve
my friends better than I do in fact so long as my present condition
lasts. For, though I am certainly much better in a general way, yet

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 283

I cannot take to scribbling at all largely (I mean still only letters and
notes) 'without white nights coming promptly upon me and throwing
back my full recovery. I am anxious, if I can at all achieve it, to get
home and to the beginnings of work again by September 15 at latest ;
and that means that I must carefully husband the strength that so slowly
returns, even if (as is the fact) I have in my drawer letters still un-
answered from last November !

As to your kind offer and the Committee's handsome proposal,
that I should report for Roman Catholic Theology at next year's Summer
Meeting of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology my difficulty is
not so much that I am uncertain as to my health as from now to then;
but that I have now managed carefully to transfer or postpone all my
literary engagements (except a long-standing address at end of this
October) for the purpose of concentrating upon attempting a new book
which has, for many a year, been getting ready in my head and heart.
And at 67^ I must not hope to achieve that and sundry other things
alongside of it. Yet experience has taught me that one may be actually
much helped on in a big, long task like that, by some smaller, short
affair provided, however, that this latter does not break in upon the
former as quite disparate and distracting. If you can allow me till
Dec. ist, to see how I get on with my big job, I shall be able to judge
then, and I will then let you know, one way or the other.

As to Norman Kemp Smith I have got to know him quite intimately,
owing to having induced him to come and speak to our L.S.S.R. on
June 3rd last. He then stayed three days with us, and in his Paper, and
in the private talks we had about it, he revealed pretty well, I think,
the whole of his deepest convictions. Well as I know, and sincerely
as I like, Baillie, I could not but wish N. K. S. to have the Edinburgh
succession. Had N. K. S. been already occupying a Chair somewhere
in the British Isles, or even elsewhere in Europe, the case might have been
different. I was glad to be able, quite sincerely, to dwell upon this
latter circumstance to Baillie, when he wrote asking me to write him a
testimonial, and when oh, the odiousness ! I had to get out of doing
so, not because I felt B. would not be a worthy holder of the Chair, but
because N. K. S. seemed to me so clearly to deserve a European appoint-
ment. I assured B. I should not write a Testimonial for N. K. S. either.
I am truly sorry for B.'s disappointment; and, with you, I fear it is
great.

How delightful about your brother-in-law's marriage to the Poet
Laureate's daughter how beautiful she may well be, with that really
quite Apolline Father ! And how cheering that your sister-in-law has
so fully got over her terrible accident. How happy you two good people
must feel in your kind hearts ! May you both have an excellent
holiday !

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Some time back Dr. Marcel Rifaux, who founded and, I think, so
ably edited short-lived little Demain an uncommonly fine character and
cultivated mind, and a man with excellent literary and philosophical
connections wrote to invite me to contribute, and to suggest other
English contributors, to a volume he was preparing to edit, answering
the question : " Pourquoi suis-je spiritualiste ? " The whole would
appear in French, in English, in German, and in Italian. Jacques
Chevalier would translate the English communications for the French
Edition. I had to refuse for myself, but I proposed four other English
contributors : Clement WeU and A. E. Taylor, for mature work ;
Flew and Leslie Hunter, for junior work. If and when R. writes to
you, pray strive to say " Yes " ; I think you would do much good.

Kindest grateful regards to you both from my Wife also.

Yours very sincerely,

F. V. HtJGEL.

To G. G.

Aug. 18, 1919.

I am always so glad, my darling Child, when you can and do articulate
some perplexity about one or other of the huge, rich, many-sided not
questions but facts and laws which I try to help you to see ; for thus
I feel on sure ground not only as to these great facts, but also as to
your whereabouts, or your obscurity, concerning them. I do not any
more remember my exact object in telling you what you have evidently
written down very accurately. But I will now take the point in (and
more or less by) itself, and will make it as clear as I possibly can.

You see, my G., that, with the all but limitless sway of subjectivism,
especially since the i8th century, almost everyone nowadays, who is not
deeply fed and filled by quite definite religious life and convictions,
thinks, if they think of truth and fact at all, as of things not given, not
found, but as things somehow projected, or created, by us, and this, all
within and only for the purpose of our human nature and human,
limitedly human, certainties and happiness. Strictly speaking, such an
attitude should never speak of truth as in any sense ultimate and inde-
pendent of ourselves, or of any reality as certainly existing prior to, and
independently of, our affirmation of it. Such a temper of mind, if it
talks of Church, of Christ, of God at all, can only talk of them as just so
many " beautiful " or " interesting " ideas within your and my brain
and heart, as things without any reality outside these receptacles ; such
people could not ever raise the question as to whether all these three facts
and realities (as you and I hold them to be) themselves communicate them-
selves to man, themselves invade his consciousness, provided said conscious-
ness is pure and sincere. This question, note, dear, is distinct from the

VON HOGEL'S LETTERS 285

question as to whether or not Church, Christ, God, are all three true,
all three real. The Roman Catholic Church, any and every Christian
group or individual, who would deny, or even discriminate between the
truth, the reality, of any one of the three, would stultify itself or himself.
God leads to Christ, and Christ leads to the Church ; and, inversely,
the Church leads to Christ, and Christ leads to God. Or, better, the
Church always involves Christ, and Christ always involves the Church.
This, dear, is clear enough, isn't it ?

But please note (not as contradictory to this, but contrary, but
different to this) that, when we speak thus, we are speaking of the
complete interconnection, the complex three mountain chain, as God
always sees it, as some human souls here below always see it. We are
not speaking as it is in itself, whether many or few, all or no, human
souls see it. We are not speaking as (in this world of slow growth, of
complications and of trial, of weakness, cowardice and sin) the situation
actually stands. Everywhere, in this little cabined life of man, we have
to introduce a similar distinction between the complete type, as most
certainly willed by God, most certainly planned by Him, and effected
again and again by and with His help, and the incomplete, the merely
inchoate individuals, always, in all ranks of actual life, the considerable
majority. I believe only 5 per cent, of most flies ever attain to their
full development, yet every one of these 19 in every 20 achieve, as far
as they go, the type ! They indicate, they imply it. With mammals
the waste is less, but still very large if it is right to talk of waste, where,
very possibly, life is, after all, the richer for even such inchoations.
When we come to man, we still get something similar, the many mere
beginnings of human life, children dead before birth or before the age
of reason, idiots, the insane. Also the long ages of Barbarism. All
this, note, quite independently of any personal fault, any sin, on the
part of these inchoate human beings. Well, here again, we can say
that so far (that is, apart from any sin) the world is, after all, richer thus,
than if there were here no such inchoations, than if it were reduced to
those individuals who attain to the full human stature.

Now this great fact or law, this great difference between type and
individual, the realised ideal and the average attainment, runs also clearly
through the manifestations of God to man, and the apprehensions by
man of God and of His condescensions. The Jewish religion was not
false for the thirteen centuries of the pre-Christian operations ; it was,
for those times, God's fullest self-revelation, and man's deepest appre-
hension of God. And this same Jewish religion can be, is, still the
fullest religious truth for numerous individuals whom God leaves in
their good faith, in their not directly requiring the fuller, the fullest,
light and aid of Christianity. What is specially true of the Jewish
religion is in a lesser, but still a very real degree, true of Mohammedanism,

286 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

and even of Hinduism, Parseeism, etc. It is not true that all religions
are equally true, equally pure, equally fruitful the differences are, on
the contrary, profound. And it is our duty never to level down, never
to deny or to ignore God's upward-moving self-revelation, God's type-
religion. At the same time our ardour requires harnessing to patience,
to a meek encouragement of all the smoking flax, all the broken reeds,
of our earthly time and comrades, for these are God's individuals.

Now then, back to your precise question. The ordinary R.C.
scholastic text-book teaches that such good faith (not adequacy); such
individual sufficiency (not type-fulness), is more largely operative with
regard to ignorance, or even denial, of the Christian Church, or even of
Christ, than with regard to denial, or even to ignorance of God. This
because, after all, Church and Christ are historical, contingent facts,
which require to be imparted to us, in a way like the existence of the
Emperor Augustus and the reality of the United States of America, this
at the beginning. But, no doubt, the non-Christian religions all furnish
their followers with (imperfect) conceptions of God, so also with
(imperfect) conceptions of Christ (Moses, Mahommed, Buddha, etc.),
and imperfect conceptions of the Church (Temple, Mosque, etc.).
Whereas God is the metaphysical, the absolute Reality, which is involved
in, which indicates itself in, our deepest needs, thoughts, and conscience.

When I told you that story of Monsieur Littre, I did so, amongst
other reasons, in order to indicate how careful, how non-judging, as to
individuals we should keep ourselves, even where such individuals ignore
or deny even God. Yet I do think that that ordinary R.C. teaching
is after a very real distinction, and also that the present-day ordinary
cheery dismissal of all thought of responsibility, and even of guilt, in
such denials, is but part and parcel of the insufferable shallowness of
Naturalism.

To G. G.

Sept. i, 1919.

I want this little scribble to reach you on your starting your packing-
fortnight. I want to put, very shortly, what has helped myself, so
greatly, for now a generation.

Well you are going pack, pack and unpack, unpack for a fortnight.
What is it that I would have you quietly set your mind and heart on,
during that in itself lonesome and dreary bit of your road, Child ? Why,
this ! You see, all we do has a double-relatedness. It is a link or links
of a chain that stretches back to our birth and on to our death. It is
part of a long train of cause and effect, of effect and cause, in your own
chain of a life this chain variously intertwisted with, variously affecting,
and affected by, numerous other chains and other lives. It is certainly

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 287

your duty to do quietly your best that these links may help on your own
chain and those other chains, by packing well, by being a skilful packer.

Yes, but there is also, all the time, another, a far deeper, a most
darling and inspiring relation. Here, you have no slow succession,
but you have each single act, each single moment joined directly to
GOD Himself not a chain, but one Great Simultaneity. True,
certain other acts, at other moments, will be wanted, of a kind more
intrinsically near to God Prayer, Quiet, Holy Communion. Yet
not even these other acts could unite you as closely to God as can do
this packing, if and when the packing is the duty of certain moments,
and if, and as often as, the little old daughter does this her packing with
her heart and intention turned to God her Home, if she offers her
packing as her service, that service which is perfect liberty.

Not even a soul already in Heaven, not even an angel or archangel,
can take your place there ; for what God wants, what God will love to
accept, in those rooms, in those packing days, and from your packing
hands, will be just this little packing performed by you in those little
rooms. Certainly it has been mainly through my realising this doctrine
a little, and through my poor little self-exercising in it, that I have got
on a bit, and you will get on faster than I have done with it. You
understand ? At one moment, packing ; at another, silent adoration
in Church ; at another, dreariness and unwilling drift ; at another,
the joys of human affections given and received ; at another, keen keen
suffering of soul, of mind, in apparent utter loneliness ; at another,
external acts of religion ; at another, death itself. All these occupations
every one can, ought, and will be, each when and where, duty, reason,
conscience, necessity GOD calls for it ; it will all become the means
and instruments of loving, of transfiguration, of growth for your soul,
and of its beatitude. But it is for GOD to choose these things, their
degrees, combinations, successions ; and it is for you just simply, very
humbly, very gently and peacefully, to follow that leading.

Per Crucem ad Lucem.

To G. G.

Clonboy, Englefield Green,

Sept. 17, 1919.

Well, now, my darling, here is my letter for your restarting. I will
attempt to make two, more or less new, points very important discrimi-
nations very clear to you, after first getting two immediate practical
details out of the way.

I want you, then, carefully to study all the remaining Latin (Roman)
Christian books I have given or lent you in the last packets. Tell me

288 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

when you are getting to the end of this study (the little Tertullian and
the Swete at least twice, please !) and I will get quite ready for the first
packet of Greek books classical (Pagan) Greek books first on the
same scale as that we did the Latin books on. ...
Now for my points.

1. It is quite possible (it is certainly much the more common state
of soul) that your now deep and living sense of religion is making non-
religious subjects more or less insipid to you that you are feeling it
rather a bore to concentrate upon Homer and Pindar, after Tertullian
and the Confessions. But if this is so, or if it comes on, later on :
I want you, my dear, carefully to ignore, and vigorously to react against,
this mentality. If there is one danger for religion if there is any one
plausible, all-but-irresistible trend which, throughout its long rich
history, has sapped its force, and prepared the most destructive counter-
excesses, it is j ust that, that allowing the fascinations of Grace to deaden
or to ignore the beauties and duties of Nature. What is Nature ?
I mean, all that, in its degree, is beautiful, true and good in this many-
levelled world of the one stupendously rich God ? Why, Nature (in
this sense) is the expression of the God of Nature ; just as Grace is the
expression of the God of Grace. And not only are both from God,
and to be loved and honoured as His : but they have been created, they
are administered and moved, by God as closely inter-related parts of one
great whole of the full and vivid knowledge and service of Him and
happiness of ourselves. No Grace without the substrate, the occasion,
the material, of Nature ; and (in the individuals called to the realisation
of the type) no Nature without Grace. Do you fully grasp, what I
am driving at ? That I want you, just because you long for Religion,
to continue to cultivate, to cultivate more carefully and lovingly, also
the interests, the activities, that are not directly religious ? And this,
not simply because, " Why, of course, we must eat our dinner ; of
course, we must have our little relaxations," but, much more, because,
without these not directly religious interests and activities, you
however slowly and unperceivedly lose the material for Grace to work
in and on. When we come to do the Church History of the Middle
Ages and of the Renaissance, etc., I shall be able to point out to you, on
a huge scale, this great principle either fructifying all or sterilising all.
Meanwhile, practise, practise it, and keep it up, long after I have gone !
Hardly any woman works her religion thus ; but then too, how thin and
abstract, or how strained and unattractive, the religion of most women
becomes, owing to this their eliminations of religion's materials and
divinely intended tensions !

2. Hardly distinguishable in theory, yet rather different in practice,
is the other point I want you carefully to watch. I have so much
insisted upon the Church in my recommendations that it may look

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 289

inconsistent if I warn you against Church societies, Church newspapers
the little Churchinesses which, I should think, must be fairly frequent
in your Cathedral town yet, just this, the equivalent of just this, has
been perhaps my longest, subtlest difficulty and temptation, ever since,
through God's mercy, the Church took me and I gave myself to the
Church. It was only when I was forty, that this trouble and uncertainty
ceased again owing to light from and through a saintly leader. I never
have gained the bigger lights on myself, except that way. To love
Holy Communion, yet tactfully, un-ironically, to escape from all
Eucharistic Guilds, etc. ; to care for God's work in the world especially
in and through Christianity, and yet (again quite silently, with full
contrary encouragement to others who are helped by such literature)
never opening a Church paper or magazine ; and so on and so on :
what a pushing forward and a sudden inhibiting back all this seems to be.

Yet if you are made at all like myself what safety, what expansion
will be yours ! This, though, only if you have your life full of good,
wholesome not technically religious interests ; and if these non-religious
interests are more and more penetrated, warmed, widened, sweetened by
the purest, humblest, most self-oblivious, homely heroism of super-
nature of Grace in the full sense of the word. Such a life will also
greatly help you in keeping free from what might make you an un-
necessary stumbling-block to other not yet religiously awake souls ; and
this, without the least indifference or sorry " naturalising " on your part.
At forty I learnt this ; at forty or so, my G , learn you this also.

I need not say that neither i nor 2 is of any obligation for you.
They are only suggestions for you to watch and to see, whether and how
they fit you. If you cannot get forward in this fashion, by all means
get on in the other way. I only want to clear away every possible
half-notion that to love God, Christ, Church dearly, it is necessary for
everyone (hence also for you) to be Churchy. But again, humility,
consideration, patience, encouraging of others to become quite different
from ourselves ; all this can alone render the kind of independence
I mean safe, because creaturely, and the isolation not fundamental or
ultimate but only one concerned with middle things, with means and
applications.

Am now weary. God bless you, Child. Be faithful, and He will
sweeten to you, in the long run, all things, even bitter death itself.

To G. G.

Oct. 6, 1919.

I write to-day, hoping that this (now the strike is over) may reach
you to-morrow on the first anniversary of your dear father's death.
I often and often think of him ; indeed he, just as you yourself, Child,

u

290 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

are in my poor prayers thrice every day. And I love to think that, if
he, in that great life beyond, is allowed to know what happens here below
to his youngest, he is glad and grateful for your deep growth during this
year just gone by. This growth has assuredly preserved, and only still
further deepened, the noble good all the touching purity and generosity
he taught you and he exemplified to you, indeed which, in a true
sense, he gave you with his blood.

I want to write now, also, because, since you cannot come just now
(very naturally, though I am truly sorry), I should like to make some
remarks upon quite a number of practical points or of questions raised
by you since last I wrote.

I. As to the practical points.

1. Much frequentation of the Cathedral. 1 You know well, how
greatly I love this for you. Yet there is one warning I would give you,
and would beg you to bear in mind. Do not overdo it ; I mean, do not
take your utter fill, while the attraction is thus strong. If we want
our fervour to last, we must practise moderation even in our prayer,
even in our Quiet. And certainly it is perseverance in the spiritual life,
on and on, across the years and the changes of our moods and trials,
health and environment : it is this that supremely matters. And you
will add greatly to the probabilities of such perseverance, if you will get
into the way (after having settled upon the amount of time that will be
wise for you to give to the Cathedral, or your prayer of quiet in general)
of keeping a little even beyond this time, when you are dry ; and a little
short of this time, when you are in consolation. You see why, don't
you ? Already the Stoics had the grand double rule : abstine et sustine :
" abstain and sustain " : i.e. moderate thyself in things attractive and
consoling; persevere, hold out, in things repulsive and desolating. There
is nothing God loves better, or rewards more richly, than such double
self-conquest as this ! Whereas all those who heedlessly take their
glut of pleasant things, however sacred these things may be, are in grave
danger of soon outliving their fervour, even if they do not become
permanently disgusted.

2. As to Churchy people, I did not, of course, mean devotedly
Christian people, lovers of the Church, who work these loves into a
large thoughtfulness. . . .

3. As to Bury's History : please write your name in it, and keep it
as a further gift from me : it will be very useful for frequent reference
in most of your further readings of Greek things. And, Child, try,
by very frequent looking at the coins illustrations, to connect the chief
Greek cities with their coins. It is in that way that the geography of
ancient Greece sticks in my head. And dull as Geography, and still
more Chronology, are, when taken simply by themselves yet without

1 G. G. was now living in Salisbury.

VON HtT GEL'S LETTERS 291

them without a clear framework of time and of space in which to
place and to remember the facts, external or interior, of the history, you
will never remember the facts, and hence you will never be able your-
self to reason upon, to apply the history. Let the coins help you very
largely !

II. As to questions.

1. Shakespeare's Macbeth. I think you are right, and that there
there is a truly Christian penetration and estimate. To-day week I
will send you, on long loan, a glorious book : Bradley's Shakesperean
Tragedy : Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear. You will love it, I am
sure. It is a book really worthy of its subject.

2. Shorthouse's John Inglesant. I must say I feel that book to
have but one (a truly great) greatness, as against three very bad faults
faults which, I must confess, continue to spoil the pleasure I might
otherwise find in it. The book, then, I think, has one perception, or,
rather an instinct stronger than the author is himself aware of I mean,
an all-penetrating sense of the massiveness, the awful reality, of the
spiritual life within the Roman Catholic Church. This that he thus
sees, is assuredly a fact, and a huge fact ; but it is a fact unknown, or
turned away from, or minimised by the large majority even of religious
Englishmen. And I really believe that the undoubtedly great fascina-
tion of this book for so many serious souls, is just this its all-pervading
sense of that very certain, but very largely unknown fact. But then
I feel that to one who, like myself, has lived within, has lived and been
redeemed and been formed by that great life in that great Church, that
discovery of Shorthouse is no discovery : if anything, such an one is
somewhat irritated that something to him so massively plain, should
the discovery of it stamp a book as quite sui generis. And then, against
that strength of the book stand, I think, three great even if smaller
weaknesses, (i) The book, the man's style, indeed mind, are precious
surely, as much so as is Pater's Marius. All that is turned and re-
turned, is cooked to my taste to weariness. (2) The central figure and
fate in the book Molinos and his end are far from certainly what they
are painted here. Possible it is that M. was innocent ; I have studied
the case very carefully, and have said so in print. But there is no
certainty ; and much too much mysticism and moral depravity have
certainly gone together in not a few other cases. (3) The underlying
doctrine of the book is very lopsided, indeed it is false. All through, a
Quaker indifference to the visible, to Forms, to History to the Body
Time and Space is actively at work. Yet nothing is being more
clearly re-proved, quite independently of the old institutions, by modern
Psychology, than that that independence is only possible in a world
saturated with the results of dependence. Mysticism, in all religions,
always comes long after those religions have won and trained the soul

292 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

by their historic happenednesses, by their close contact with time and
space. We shall find this later on, with the Ancient Greek, the Indian,
the Jewish, the Mohammedan, the Christian religions. And to think
like Shorthouse, is historic ingratitude to a high degree. I find that,
throughout his book, those that insist strongly on institutions, and that
fear or oppose more or less pure Mysticism, are all, in so far, worldlings,
power-lovers, Pharisees, etc. ! Stuff and nonsense : I know that this
is a clumsy, false analysis ; although, of course, there are worldlings
amongst the strong institutionalists, as there are fanatics or moral
decadents amongst the " exquisite " mystics.

3. Dean Colet. Yes, he is a very attractive personality, and
Seebohm's book is a good book. But I have changed have had to
change much as to those Renaissance Catholic Reformers these last
10 years. My ideal used to be Sir Thomas More. I still, of course,
admit their greatness ; and I hold still, with all my heart, that that
Reform would have been far better than the Protestant violences which
supplanted it. But I now have found in detail how profoundly ignorant,
how bigoted, were all these men, as to the Middle Ages they lumped
these latter indiscriminately together, as just one long 6 or 7 centuries
or more of utter barbarism and contemptible puerilities. Dante and
Aquinas, Anselm, Bernard, the Poverello : barbarians ! What a
notion ! The fact is, certainly, we are all coming to know it well
now that these men came at the fag end of some five generations of
Iron Middle Ages, of their dissolution ; and they were too disgusted,
too impatient, too much blinded by the new light and lights, to pierce
through those 150 years, back to the Golden Middle Age. The
Golden Middle Age is the culmination, so far, of the Christian spirit
as a world force and a world outlook ; and compared with its greatest
figures just named, even More and Colet, Fisher and Erasmus, are thin
and literary indeed. This, too, you will be shown in detail later on.

Now I will have to be pretty silent till October is at an end ; have
to incubate my Address at Birmingham on October 27. Grand, if you
could come here, soon after.

To Professor dement Webb

Oct. 9, 1919.

My dear Webb, I have a somewhat ill-assorted lot of points I
want to put to you : be patient, please, if I hop you about somewhat
unmercifully.

For one thing (mentioned first, because it may help to excuse me)
I came back here on Sept. 22, after recruiting ever since June 5, at a
very kind cousin's house in Englefield Green, spending many a happy
hour in Windsor Great Park, two minutes from the house. I have got

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 293

back certainly very much better better even than when I wrote to
you last, but still with various unmistakeable signs that, if I really again
intend to work seriously, I will have to ignore (on the surface) my friends
for long spells of time. I am clearing up my mass of accumulated papers,
so as to have everything tidy and get-at-able when I make my start at
composition work on Monday next a short, though difficult flight this,
as a beginning an address to be delivered before the " Clerical Society "
in Birmingham on Oct. 27. Hence I write the more pressing of my
letters, before getting some 18 days or so away to more concentrated
occupation.

I write about four things:

1. Please find herewith Emil Wolff on Bacon and Plato. In
sorting out my pamphlets these days I came across this, and I remem-
bered that you asked me to lend it to you. Pray keep it altogether, if
it is of any real use to you. I see that I exaggerated the range of the
Dissertation it deals with only one of Bacon's sources ; but I do not
doubt its thoroughness within these its limits.

2. Will you kindly give this note (of congratulation) to Dr. Foligno
I do not know his address since his return to Oxford. I am so very
glad he has secured this Professorship ; I did not even know of its
foundation.

3. You will, I suppose, by now have got to know Dr. Yngve
Brilioth, and his young wife Dr. Soderblom's daughter now that he,
Dr. B., has returned for a little while to Oxford with this his bride.
I like him thoroughly. But you will have the pull over me with them
through your knowing her Father. The Archbishop has been very
kind to me, in most various ways, but I have never yet met him.

4. I have given a card of presentation, to yourself and Mrs. Webb,
to my great-nephew (Sir Hubert Parry's grandson) Richard Green, who
is just starting at New College a thoroughly good, gentlemanly, shy
lad of 1 8 I believe a good classic but who has now taken to Physics
especially electricity. His Mother is a deeply religious woman, and
notices how little religious are her boy's natural science friends. I
have told her how utterly kind you two dear people are, and how solidly,
tactfully religious.

With affectionate gratitude to you both,

F. v. HUGEL.

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

Oct. 13, 1919.

I have never forgotten what you told me of Dr. Merz and the
conclusions of his long and most devoted search after the fullest and
deepest truth. You well guessed how profoundly sane and solid, and

294 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

how far-reachingly important, I would instantly feel them. And so
it is a genuine delight and spiritual help to me to hear from you that
A Fragment on the Human Mind is about to be given to the Public.
The strike delayed your letter's arrival ; and then I wanted to give
myself some three or four days in which to look around me before answer-
ing your very attractive proposal. You see, I am still so little strong that,
on resuming work, at last only this morning (after having had to wait
and wait ever since my operation of last October), I knew well that I
was giving myself a decent chance of persevering in it, if I cut myself
adrift, for a good while at least, from all other undertakings, however
attractive. Even letter-writing must be severely curtailed, and this if
only because, if I broke down permanently, I should be exposing myself
to deepest melancholy.

I find, then, that I can indeed promise to read, and to re-read every
line of Dr. Merz's new book. Also, if I achieve my present big under-
taking, to use it, and analyse it, and to draw respectful attention to it,
as well as I possibly can manage. But I feel certain that any undertaking
of a review (a thing that I have done not more than three or four times
in my life, with infinite trouble, and with, I think, not very much effect)
would be considerably spoiling my present, long and costingly prepared,
chances of fresh work of my own. And in this fresh work I could
serve Dr. Merz far better, I am sure, than by any review.

Pray tell him again of my deep sympathy, my joy, and my regret.
I will deeply prize a copy with his inscription ; but I do not feel
I deserve it, and I will, most gladly, buy myself a copy.

To Dr. T. Brilioth, of Abo, Finland

Nov. 12, 1919.

I feel much ashamed of myself to have left both your last letters so
long unanswered, especially since they were both so very helpful, kind,
and welcome. But all my life I have been bad at combining different
activities ; and now, after a year's almost complete break in my work, I
thirst to keep the said resumed work free from all avoidable hamperings,
which means, alas, writing but late and shortly even to kind friends like
yourself.

I have now got my study into really good order ; and amongst the
books and papers on my working table stands Archbishop Soderblom's
massive tome on the historical evolution of the conception of God, one
of the works I shall have to study now with the greatest care. I doubt
not that my profit will be great. The Archbishop was also good
enough to send me I found it was a second time his dissertation on
the method of such researches. I have given one of these copies to a
very distinguished classical scholar, a lady friend of ours. . . .

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 295

It will be a real pleasure to my wife and myself, and also to our home
daughter, to see yourself and your wife, when you come to London.
I trust you will be staying in town for some appreciable time. We could,
in that case, have several good walks, and I could show, to you two, the
few historically interesting things of our immediate neighbourhood during
my afternoon walk. So mind you let me know, some days before your
arrival, about when you will be in town, so that we may secure yourself
and your wife for lunch or tea. This neighbourhood, on a fine day,
is charming for walks.

I trust you are seeing something of our old friends the Clement
Webbs, of Holywell Ford, Oxford. They would be sure to like, and
to be liked by, you both.

I am much interested in your attainment of that Church History
lectureship. You must tell me more about this when we meet.

To the Rev. Tissington Tatlow

Nov. 24, 1919.

It was kind of you to send me a copy of The Army and Religion ;
and I accept it with many thanks as a record and symbol, and as the
remarkable and devoted presentation, of an enquiry in which I had the
honour to take part and from which I gladly and gratefully learnt much.
I wanted, before writing, once more to have read, in this its quite final
form, Dr. Cairns' fine presentation ; but the long-deferred resumption
of my special work has made this, and all other similar systematic reading
of anything but what is directly necessary for this my own work, impos-
sible. Yet even the snatches I have been able to consider, show me
plainly that the work is at least as remarkable in its richness, fairness
of quotation and utilisation, and in incisiveness and readableness, as it
was in the proofs ; indeed, I do not doubt that it is more so.

That enquiry would always remain a memorable experience for
me, even if it had done nothing beyond getting me to know Dr. Cairns
and yourself, or, rather, yourself and Dr. Cairns. It also led on,
I think, to my getting to know your Student Movement officials
a very refreshing thing.

And this brings me to what, had I not, soon after that September
meeting at Annandale, fallen into the hands of surgeons and nurses for
so long what I would months ago have attended to, as well as I could.
You will remember that you asked, on that occasion, whether there was
anything, and if so what, that you could do, towards coming to an
understanding with our Roman Catholic Bishops especially in Ireland
concerning the character of your work and the attendance also of
R.C. young people, at your reunions and in your work generally ?

296 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

I think I entirely understood the temper and point of view of your
Movement ; and certainly I was deeply touched by what you told me
of your own history as to your attitude towards Roman Catholicism
I could not but entirely trust and deeply respect you.

Well, I have had even more time than I had wanted for considering
your query 5 and I have come to the conclusion (very reluctantly) that
there is nothing direct and official that you can do. But there remains
a discrimination and a deliberate policy which I will venture, as my
second point, to make as definite as I can, since I am sure that your
entire good faith and deeply Christian temper are fully equal to it,
and cannot fail to appreciate it ; whilst, on the other hand, not even
this temper and this faith need have already concluded, as definitely
as I venture to propose it, upon the policy I have in my head.

I. I am, then, very sorry to have to think you cannot hope to
achieve anything by a direct arrangement or understanding. When,
two years ago, I again studied the Protestant Reformation with con-
siderable care and detail, I was again struck by a most saddening and
strange feature of it which, to my very deliberate judgment, does
not mean what the Protestant Reformers took it to mean, nor what
Protestants, to this hour, interpret it as meaning. I refer to the
universally admitted fact that, in city after city of Germany and of
Switzerland, the Reformers Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist invited
the Catholic Clergy and Theologians to expound and defend their
traditional Faith, and that in city after city I think in pretty well all
Switzerland the said Clergy and Theologians shirked the issue. In
all these cases, it was only after this silence and evasion, that the re-
spective cities, etc., were proclaimed Protestant. Now it is, of course,
perfectly clear, that nothing could have more confirmed the Reforming
Party in their (assuredly already sufficiently strong) assumption that
theirs was the quite clear, absolutely certain, indeed irresistible truth.
Nevertheless it is very certain, that the silence and the shirking sprang
directly, not from the erroneousness of the Catholic position, but from
the very general inferiority (for the time being) of the representatives of
the old positions in matters of learning, eloquence, enthusiasm as
compared with the flower, or perhaps even the average, of the Reformers.
It is easy to see that what I mean is really the explanation of that
" going by default," because, some 30 years later, the situation had
changed there was, by then, no more the inferiority indicated ; and,
up to two hundred years later, the Catholic expositions of a Baronius,
a Petau, a Bossuet, were at least as learned and vigorous as the best
Protestant work.

But all this is here meant, merely to indicate how old alas, how
very old is the policy of silence and aloofness ! (To be quite fair,
I would only add that a good deal of the Protestant attitude and writing

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 297

was, qua Protestant, up to, say, now 60 years or so ago, of a tone and
temper unworthy to elicit a full and dignified consideration.) The
authorities of the R.C. Church are still immersed in that over-defensive,
aloof and silent, temper and policy which cannot well fail to produce,
at least upon outsiders of the nobler sort, the very opposite effect from
that desired by every fervent Roman Catholic.

2. But, dear Mr. Tatlow, you can do something something
immensely virile, generous and great ; you can refuse to let this attitude
of the R.C. authorities cloud your mind or embitter your heart against
the contents of the Creed they thus themselves obscure. Monsieur
Thiers used to say that France would, in the long run, belong to the
wisest, the most inclusive, amongst the competing political parties of his
country. Somewhat similarly, but far more certainly, all largeness and
wisdom will tell for, and all sectarianism and crudeness will tell against,
whatsoever religious body practises either set of dispositions. Hence I
trust that, for everybody's sake, you will continue, and will even improve
upon, your respect for, and reasonable care of, your R.C. students.
I should love to think that in your Book Room, your book recommenda-
tions, even (eventually) in your own publications, you would work
towards the deeply historical, generous, just, view of Church History,
especially of the Middle Ages, represented by the present Master of
Balliol, the late Professor F. W. Maitland, etc. Now and then you
could have an R.C. book provided always it were deeply scholarly
and fair such as Richard Simpson's Edmund Campion. The very
spiritual life of even the least ecclesiastical-minded of your students
would, in the long run, be thus improved since, after all, we are none
of us built up in water-tight compartments, and it is really better to see
anything and everything as it really is.

Pray forgive this long letter it is a very busy man's expression
of deep confidence in your rare integrity of mind and Christian
devotedness.

P.S. In reading over the above, I find myself to have written as
though you were the sole arbiter of the Student Movement's orientation.
Yet my little pleadings will hold good for your share in the shaping of
your movement's policy a share which is doubtless great.

To Professor Clement Webb

Dec. 3, 1919.

Forgive me for being a couple of days behind the latest date I had
given you for letting you know my decision concerning the kind offer
to take a leading share in next Summer's Meeting of the Oxford Society
of Historical Theology, I delayed as long as I could, because I wanted

298 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

first to be well started again at my old studies, so as to forecast better
how all could or would fit in.

I regret to find that, taking all in all, I had better, I think, decline.
I do so with much reluctance. I have, now for many years, never
said " no " to any proposal, to which I did not clearly see very definite
objections. In this case, my reasons against have nothing whatever to
do with your Committee with any misgivings as to not being accorded
sufficient freedom etc. My reasons are simply that I find my health
iust allows me, so far (after three weeks' trial), to do i^ hour of concen-
trated study a day. I am anxious to give myself every chance of really
achieving a new, long-planned book ; and if I do not get considerably
stronger by, say, May next, I would have then to make a serious break
in this my work, and I would, perhaps, somewhat lose the thread of it,
if, at that time, I had to begin preparing the proposed Paper. True,
such little breaks I have often found very refreshing. But then, in this
case, there comes in, as the second hostile reason, the fact that my subject
would (through no fault of yours) be, inevitably, largely a depressing
one for me. This, because I would have to discuss not this or that
department of Theology, by whomsoever worked ; nor again, the large
lines of the Theology I believe in : but the specialist work of Roman
Catholics during these last say, twenty years. This would bring me
straight up against all the dreariness of the Modernist involvements, at
a date still too early, I think, to do much good.

Pray do not think that I mean indirectly to criticise your Committee's
plan. On the contrary, I think it excellent. I would, indeed, suggest
that it might very profitably encourage each of the representatives of
the several chief religious bodies, whilst bringing forward the best
theological work achieved by their own body, to draw out, with quiet
candour, in what points they have found or consider their own body to
favour (unconsciously or more or less deliberately) this or that study and
method, or, on the contrary, to thwart or deflect them.

I like to dwell upon the very certain fact that a marked detente has
taken place within the Roman Catholic Church under the present
Pontificate ; and upon the consequence that, this detente continuing,
such a Paper as you now so kindly offer me might, with great advantage,
be furnished by a Roman Catholic Scholar, say, in another two or three
years' time.

To G, G.

Jan. 2, ipzo.

I had counted upon writing my first 1920 letter to you ; but, alas,
strict duty intervened, and forced me to write to other three people
instead. But I want you to look upon this scribble as though written
on New Year's Day itself.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 299 .

I want, then, to wish you a very rich, deep, true, straight and simple
growth in the love of God, accepted and willed gently but greatly, at the
daily, hourly cost of self. I have to try my little old best more than ever
at this, now ; for I find that any and all brooding or sulking or useless
self-occupation any pride or vanity at once disturbs or dries up my
incubation-work. Professor James Ward and I agreed one day, that
nothing in philosophy, still more in religion, should ever be attempted
in and with the first clearness (what, e.g., journalists are content with,
and have to be content with), but in and with the second clearness, which
only comes after that first cheery clarity has gone, and has been succeeded
by a dreary confusion and obtuseness of mind. Only this second clear-
ness, rising up, like something in no wise one's own, from the depths of
one's sub-consciousness only this is any good in such great matters.
And this process is costly, humiliating, and very easily disturbed by
rubbishy self-occupations.

I am so glad you are trying to work the Imitation into your life :
it is the only way to read it which is really worthy of what itself is so
intensely alive. Now there is a book written as should be all religious
books ; they should be the quintessence of a long experience and fight
in suffering and self-transformation. Also the 20 Huvelin sayings
they sprang straight from a life penetrated by God and the deepest love
of Him. I will, a little later on, copy out for you another 20 sayings
they are all, please God, at work within me ; and how happy, if they
can get to work in my niece child also !

As to my Apocalyptic Element, keep it as long as you feel re-reading
it can help you. I, have two or three other papers which may also
be of use to you. But, you see, with religious reading I always feel
the situation is different from more ordinary reading. I mean, that
religious reading should always be select, slow, ruminating, and given
to comparatively few books or papers. So we will, when you are
again ready, get on with our Greek things plenty of them and,
alongside, and behind them all, will be our few deepest readings, full of
prayer, full of self-humiliation, full of gentle attempts, gently to will
whatever suffering God may kindly send us. A Jesuit novice once told
me, with kindling countenance, how grand he had found the practice
of at once meeting suffering with joy. God alone can help us succeed
in this ; but what is Christianity, if it be not something like that ?

To G. G.

Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 17, 1920.

I want this letter to reach you on Ash Wednesday, when we all
start Lent, because there is one little practice I should like to dwell upon
for a minute, in case you have not yet waked up to it, or that you require,

300 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

perhaps, a little encouragement in it. I mean the practice of some little
voluntary renunciation. I know well, of course, how much vague and
airy wisdom oozes out of the comfortable and shallow modern mind
about this. But then you see, we have the little (!) examples of the
Baptist in the wilderness, with his wild honey and locusts meal ; our
Lord's Fast of 40 days ; St. Paul's mastery of his body ; and really
without a break, the asceticism of all the great Saints. I say this not
to suggest anything special in your food, sleep or dress ; and as to the
amount of Church, half an hour a day will be enough, and it would be
unwise to add to it, even in Lent. But I am thinking of something
without thinking what that would correspond, say, to my not buying
any books for myself during Lent. Depend upon it such little self
checks checks on good propensions, and checks self-imposed where
they spring from Love, really feed Love. They are good things and
still useful to our spiritual growth. . . .

To G. G.

March 5, 1920.

I am

sure that when, say, 20 years hence, you look back upon your life, you
will specially thank God for this double current I have tried to establish
in your mind and soul : the current directly religious this very pure
in quality and genially costly ; the current not directly religious, this
also very large and deep a great bucket of pure water into which to
drop drops of the purest religious wine. This greatly helps us to escape
all reactions. . . .

To Mrs. Llllie

March 13, 1920.

It is truly kind of you to write to me thus. Your letter of Feb. 3rd
reached Edinburgh on March 8th and myself here a day later. It is
letters such as this, and hardly ever reviews, that make writing worth
its while to the natural man, and in so far as he writes with any thought
of eventually having a response to his labours. I thank you also for the
interesting photographs ; these, with what you typed for me, and still
more what you add in sheer manuscript, seem to make me know you
really well, though, of course, not exhaustively. Let me, then, attempt
two or three discriminations for you, such as I feel may help you. But
pray do not strain over them ; if they readily find a place in your heart
and conscience, good, get them to grow there ; if they don't fit, well,
again, I will have meant well and you will forgive !

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 301

1. Catholicism at its best, in its depths (not always, not often, visible),
retains certain intuitions and fruitfulnesses of the supernatural order, which
Protestantism has never securely gained, and which, if it were alone in
the world, might cease to have an institutional home. Take the world-
fleeing noble ascetical, monastic pole or element of the Christian (indeed,
of any deep) life. I yesterday saw a Sikh convert to Christianity (was
received by the Haficaas, thirteen years ago). This Sundar Singh felt
called, a month after his baptism, to the Sadhu life that of an itinerant,
penniless, celibate preacher ; took the vow of this, and has kept it ever
since. Now what interested me so deeply in his history was to note
that Bible and ecclesiastical Protestant missionaries of India have had
great difficulty in accepting him, and have had to work hard to interpret
him. Why ? Because, as he is well aware himself, he is neither more
or less than a Friar, a la St. Francis ; and because poor dear Protestantism,
as such, is simply without the sense that that is just simply what Our
Lord and His followers did and were, and that something of the sort is
an essential of full Christianity. Of course, no Catholic, indeed no
Greek, or Russian, or Oriental, Church Christian, would have the
slightest difficulty. As I told him, a Christian Sadhu (a Dominican
Friar) first helped me to God when I was eighteen ; how could I boggle
at him, another Sadhu, now that I am sixty-seven ?

Another point which Catholicism has still quite alive, and which
Church Protestantism has strangely little of, is the sense that religion is
not a department of the civil service, as the late Lord Houghton so
touchingly used to say it is. In the midst of their absorption in the
question as to whether Romanism is, or is not, loyal to the State, most
Protestants have been curiously without the sense that Christianity was,
for the first three centuries, an outlawed religion.

And a third point appears clearly in the pages of Pope Benedict XIV
of his great book on the Beatification and Canonization of the Servants
of God. You will there find that (not for beatification, but) for
canonization, of the formal Roman kind, not three but four conditions
are necessary : (i) popular extant cultus 5 (2) three well-attested
miracles ; (3) three well-attested heroic acts ; and (4) the note of joy
in the life and influence of the person who may be as melancholy by
natural temperament as possible, but who must, somehow, be bracing,
be expansive. This last requisite the requiring it seems to me nothing
short of spiritual genius don't you think so ? I know, of course, that
God has Friends of His everywhere ; yet I doubt whether Protestantism
has produced more, or anything like as much, of such joy as it has
produced of rigorist or moralistic piety.

2. Catholicism was, in Aquihas's, and even still in More's time, a
great intellectual culture and rich mental training school, as well as the
home of saints ; but, since, say, 1720, and still more, since the French

302 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

Revolution, it has shrunk more and more to being, usually and easily,
just that home ; the culture and the school lie now, very largely, else-
where ; and, I do not say to gain, but even fully to retain, such culture
and such training within the Roman Communion is now distinctly
difficult. But pray let us have no exaggeration : though they are all
un peu a cote, though they do not dominate the popular presentation of
the Catholic faith, ripe scholars and often minds exist sure enough now
still within that great Church.

3. You have no business to abandon Protestantism, simply because
it does not help or satisfy you much ; nor to embrace Catholicism,
because it attracts you much more. You would deserve to find Rome
an utter disappointment, if you came like that ! Your one sufficient,
and really compelling motive, would be your feeling that you must, that
you would be committing sin by not coming. In that case you would
leave alone all the petty calculating as to whether, and how far, and in
what way, your Protestant mind would be understood, or refinements
of mind would not be outraged, etc. For God Who was freeing you,
and Whose pressure you would be following, would see to all that. But
/ entirely agree that, until and unless you have that quiet but definite
Divine order, these " Roman Catholic vulgarities," etc., would matter
greatly, would be a great danger for you. Better a thousand times that
you remain where you are, striving hard to be faithful to all such helps
as you may have, than to come to Rome, and to leave it again.

I venture to enclose a little prayer card for my darling eldest daughter,
who died the death of a saint on St. Clare's Day, 1915.

F. VON HUGEL.

To G. G.

March 26, 1920.

. . . Am trying to show how crude, how without solid Christian
precedents, is such a monasticism with such a sheer aloofness from every
Church organisation. I am trying to drive home Si. Teresa's magnifi-
cent rule for all her own life and for that of her Nuns to this day. That
she believed herself to have received very real direct revelations, and that
she hoped her Nuns might receive the same. But that never had she
allowed herself, or were they to allow themselves, under the apparent
suggestion of any revelation to decide anything concerning their duties,
appurtenances, work, dependents. On the contrary, the genuineness of
the rev elations, or at least the right use made of them, would always have
to be measured by the increased obedience, self-oblivion, love of enemies,
suffering. . . .

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 303

To G. G.

Easter Monday, April 5, 1920.

I have purposely waited till we should all have got through these
every year newly wonderful Church days so as to be able to refer to
the entire prism of many-coloured fact and emotion which only thus
together give us the true Christian reality and life. The great fact,
and even the commemoration of Good Friday, would, alone, be too
austere, too heartbreaking. The great fact and even just the Feast of
Easter if alone even if they had followed upon Our Lord's Hidden
Life, or even His Preaching, but without the Passion and its com-
memoration, would not have drained the Cup, the bitter cup of the
possibilities of earthly human life and earthly human interconnection
to the dregs. Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the two together,
each requiring the other, and we all requiring both only this twin fact
gives us Christianity, where suffering holds a necessary place but never
the place of the end, always only of the means. My great Troeltsch
always marvels anew at that unique combination effected by Christianity
so earnest and yet so wwrigoristic so expansive and so full of suffering
without morbidness, and of joy without sentimentality. We will all,
please God, see this more and more every year that these bitter-sweet
contraction-expansion, sacrifice-serenity great days come round. . . .

Oh how next to one's prayers and the practice of the Presence of God,
one's work, my absorption, in the mornings, in my book its immediate
preparation and composition, helps one to limit, to ignore and bear one's
load.

I am now deep in Section I of the body of the Book, but dare not yet
write any of this till I see more clearly, more vividly, the main points
and lines of my position. It is Kant especially, I have to master as to
contend with the Section on him in Eternal Life may have given you
some fair notion of him.

To Dr. T. Brilioth

April 12, 1920.

How kind of you to write me that P.C., and how apparently unap-
preciative of me to answer only now, and so shortly ! But one of the
chief crosses of my life has been my inflammable brain-conditions which,
when I am working hard, make it almost impossible for me to keep up
with my many kind friends. To-day, e.g., has had to be empty of all
but a friend's visit for an hour and a half, and then this poor little scribble!
I am now soon to study Archbishop Soderblom's Das Werden der
Gottesidee, and his Natttral Theology, etc., very carefully for my

304 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

book writing. He will help me very much, I am quite sure ; my
grateful respects to him, please ! Dr. Heiler himself kindly sent me his
astonishingly rich, suggestive, and in many ways deeply satisfactory book.
Indeed, I so greatly loved his religious realism and his sense of historical
method, and much else besides, that I found it very difficult to write
to him before studying the whole, and especially to write, and, on
an important group of points, to have to say a very deliberate " No."
I cannot accept, as the really highest, a spirituality which does not
recognise and utilise the sense stimulations indeed the whole of man.
I feel that to be the weak side of the Lutheran outlook. , , . Need I say
that this does not prevent my having learnt oceans from, and my loving
dearly, such decided Lutherans as my kindest of friends, the late H. J.
Holtzmann, or Rudolf Eucken, and others ? They have, poor friends,
to put up with my " inferiority " ; and I, in return, have to make what
I can of their " superiority " : even so, very much remains for me to sit
at the feet of the one attitude which is thoroughly congenial to me.
But I hated to have to differentiate myself from Dr. H. precisely on the
point he seemed to attach so much importance to !

To G. G.

April 21, 1920.

Here at last, my Child, I come to my scribbling to you ! I have
four letters of yours three of them long. But I think they give me
chiefly one big subject-matter for consideration the stress of dryness
and darkness, and what to do then. I know, oh, well, well what that
means. Such times must be peculiarly trying. But mark this well,
Child, irreplaceably profitable. If you but gently persevere through
them, you will come out at the other end of the gloom, sooner or later,
into ever deeper, tenderer day.

Let me give you three images, all of which have helped me on
along " many a flinty furlong." At 18 I learnt from Father Raymond
Hocking, that grandly interior-minded Dominican, that I certainly
could, with God's grace, give myself to Him, and strive to live my life
long with Him and for Him. But that this would mean winning
and practising much desolation that I would be climbing a mountain
where, off and on, I might be enveloped in mist for days on end, unable
to see a foot before me. Had I noticed how mountaineers climb
mountains ? How they have a quiet, regular, short step on the level
it looks petty ; but then this step they keep up, on and on as they
ascend, whilst the inexperienced townsman hurries along, and soon has
to stop, dead beat with the climb. That such an expert mountaineer,
when the thick mists come, halts and camps out under some slight cover

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 305

brought with him, quietly smoking his pipe, and moving on only when
the mist has cleared away.

Then in my thirties I utilised another image, learnt in my Jesuit
Retreats. How I was taking a long journey on board ship with great
storms pretty sure ahead of me ; and how I must now select, and fix
in my little cabin, some few but entirely appropriate things a small
trunk fixed up at one end, a chair that would keep its position, tumbler
and glass that would do ditto : all this, simple, strong,, and selected
throughout in view of stormy weather. So would my spirituality have
to be chosen and cultivated, especially in view of " dirty " weather.

And lastly, in my forties another image helped me they all three
are in pretty frequent use still ! I am travelling on a camel across a
huge desert. Windless days occur and then all is well. But hurricanes
of wind will come, unforeseen, tremendous. What to do then ? It is
very simple, but it takes much practice to do well at all. Dismount from
the camel, fall prostrate face downwards on the sand, covering your head
with your cloak. And lie thus, an hour, three hours, half a day ; the
sand storm will go, and you will arise, and continue your journey as if
nothing had happened. The old Uncle has had many, many such sand
storms. How immensely useful they are !

You see, whether it be great cloud-mists on the mountain side, or
huge, mountain-high waves on the ocean, or blinding sand storms in
the desert : there is each time one crucial point to form no conclusions,
to take no decisions, to change nothing during such crises, and, especially
at such times, not to force any particularly religious mood or idea in
oneself. To turn gently to other things, to maintain a vague, general
attitude of resignation to be very meek, with oneself and with others :
the crisis goes by, thus, with great fruit. What is a religion worth which
costs you nothing ? What is a sense of God worth which would be at
your disposal, capable of being comfortably elicited when and where you
please ? It is far, far more God Who must hold us, than we who must
hold Him. And we get trained in these darknesses into that sense of
our impotence without which the very presence of God becomes a
snare.

As to your feeling the facts of life and of religion complicated
that would be, I expect, in any oppressive way, only during such desola-
tions. Yet I want to note this point for you viz. that though I believe
your Confessions and Imitation (with Psalms and N.T.) and the Church
Service do not strain you, nor, I think, my letters written specially for
yourself, I am not at all sure of my writings in this respect. I mean
that they are the writings of, I believe, a masculine mind that they.,
contain far more sheer thinking than is suited to a woman. This is
why I was slow to give or to lend you my writings. Yet I did so,
because I want you to feel that there is also much hard thinking, much

306 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

unpettyfying of the great lesson which God's world and work convey
if we can and do front them fairly. I wanted you, even, in times of
temptation, to feel the realities you were called to, perhaps, straining at
times even apparently mere illusions but not cramping, not petty.
You can thus settle quietly into your little cabin with the huge billows
buffeting you, Dear, the ship : their size has not been minimised : they
are huge : well, God is in the storm as in the calm ! But, of course,
I am deeply glad the sunshine and calm are back again. And certainly
these, and these at their utmost, are intended for our eventual life !

" Par passage penible
Passons a port plaisant,"

carved a prisoner on to the wall of his cell, during his long imprisonment
in the White Tower of the Tower of London. That is just it : both
are true, both are facts : the penible of the passage and the plaisant
oh its grand expanse of the port.

To G. G.

May 4, 1920.

Have just had your pathetic little lines. I too am overwhelmed
with work. And your and my work is just the same, if we learn to do it
simply for God, simply as, here and now, the one means of growing in
love for Him. To-day it is cooking, scrubbing ; to-morrow it may be
utterly different : death itself will come in due time, but, before it, still
many a joy and many a training. We will gently practise a genial con-
centration upon just the one thing picked out for us by God. How
this helps ! How greatly we add to our crosses by being cross with
them ! More than half our life goes in wishing for things other than
those sent us. Yet it is these things, as sent, and when willed and at
last loved as sent, that train us for Home, that can form a spiritual
Home for us even here and now.

The Fioretti's chapters are each complete in itself. Five minutes
would give you rich food. And didn't St. Francis know such troubles
as yours, bigger than yours, and didn't he just rise to them in all-
transforming love !

To-morrow I am 68, yet, thank God, I feel fresh and young in
soul. . . .

To the Same

June 23, 1920.

. . . The wise way to fight antipathies is never to fight them
directly turn gently to other sights, images, thoughts, etc. If it
the hate persists, bear it gently like a fever or a toothache do not

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 307

speak to it better not speak of it even to God ; but gently turn to
Him your love and life, and tell Him gently that you want Him and all
of Him : and that you beg for courage whilst He thus leaves you dressed,
or seeing yourself dressed in what you do not want to endorse as a will-
decision, but only as purgation if so He wills. It is an itch scratch-
ing makes it worse. Away out into God's great world, Sweet, even
if your immediate landscape is just your unlovely antipathies. . . .

To G. G.

Aug. 10, 1920.

... I greatly loved seeing, actually living for a day with you, in
that precise concrete time and space condition in and through which my
child has to grow into Eternity and God .the Ever abiding. I so much
cared for the " Old Yew Inn " and the genial old owner, who made
himself very pleasant to me as he drove me down towards the ever graceful
spire of the Cathedral, with his old, a bit weary white pony. . . .

It is here especially that Christ and God helped and would help
you to turn isolation or crowdedness, natural over-vehemence, pain,
perplexity, pleasure and joy all all into gold, into love of God and
gradual assimilation to Himself. I was especially glad to see that Cruci-
fix there. Let people say what they will, there never existed, there
will never exist, a symbol so deep, so comprehensive, so realist and yet so
ideal, of our august religion as just simply the Crucifix. I once read
an address by the late Dean Stanley in which that brilliant superficiality
denounced the Crucifix as a mediaeval skull and crossbones grotesque-
ness, and contrasted this morbid extravagance with the poetry and
smiling restraint of the Catacombs and their symbols Christ as Orpheus,
Christ as Good Shepherd, etc. As if the admitted absence of the
Crucifix there did not spring from two very certain causes only the
fear of giving the Pagans any clear clue as to which is meant for Christ
(lest such acutely hostile Pagans should thereupon deface or otherwise
dishonour the image) ; and, again, the fear lest those early, not yet
traditionally rooted Roman Christians, should have their faith strained
rather than strengthened by the presentation of God hanging on the
(Roman) gallows gallows these (the Cross) which were employed only
upon slaves .runaway or the like canaille. . . .

To the Same

Aug. 31, 1920.

. . . My own first point brings up once more a matter we have
often considered but which I do not think we can ever get too much

308 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

cleared up. A friend of mine, whom I have known for 45 years, died
some days back, at 76 without any traceable shred of religion (at least
in the ordinary sense of the word). He was a man of finely clean life,
full of philanthropy, genuine and costly, a cultivated man, a scholar,
also a man of naturally religious temper. It is certainly impossible
to know the depths of any soul : yet certain points are once more
clear to me, over this further case that the agnostic tempest which
roared between say 1855 and 1875 was so violent, that no wonder
quick-witted lads went under, many, many of them. That even so,
the finer ones managed to retain much that was high and right even
that was touchingly Christian .but that they owed this, not to the
Agnosticism, but to the Christian faith, the tradition from which they
had broken away less than they themselves thought. And finally that,
not only did they show faults or limitations .who does not ? but that
these limitations were readily traceable to their Agnosticism. (I could
easily draw out the details of this in my friend.) . . .

... I am struck, too, at a peculiarity here which I have noticed
hundreds of times in actual life and in history. It is how the little
regarded, the very simple, the unbrilliant souls souls treated by
impatient others as more or less wanting are exactly, pretty often,
specially enlightened by God and specially near to Him. And there, no
doubt, is the secret of this striking interconnection between an apparent
minimum of earthly gifts and a maximum of heavenly light. The
cause is not that gifts of quick-wittedness etc. are bad, or are directly
obstacles to Grace. No. No. But that quite ordinary intelligence
real slowness of mind will quite well do as reflections of God's light,
and that such limitations are more easily accompanied by simplicity,
nai'veness, recollection, absence of self-occupation, which dispositions
are necessary for the soul's union with God. Such souls more easily
approach action and more easily escape activity. So it was markedly
with the Cure d' Ars, a soul you must get to love with me. Yet a man
who knew him well told me the Cure had been still simpler than the
charming life and notes taken of his sayings make him appear.

A wonderful thoughtful friend insisted to me that the soul's health
and happiness depended upon a maximum of zest and as little as
possible of excitement. Zest is the pleasure which comes from thoughts,
occupations, etc., that fit into, that are continuous, applications, etc.;
of extant habits and interests of a good kind duties and joys that
steady us and give us balance and centrality. Excitement is the
pleasure which comes from breaking loose, from fragmentariness, from
losing our balance and centrality. Zest is natural warmth excitement
is fever heat. For Zest to be relished requires much self-discipline
and recollection much spaciousness of mind : whereas the more dis-
tracted we are, the more racketed arid impulse-led, the more we thirst

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 309

for excitement, and the more its sclrocco air dries up our spiritual sap and
makes us long for more excitement. . . .

And that " side-shows " queer things religiously all that is not
central, sober, balanced, may indeed help certain souls in certain ways,
but that for ourselves we should carefully eschew being drawn into
attending to them, and thus weakening our own centrality.

Feed upon zest and zest-bringing things you will more and more
become so central that, even if you live thirty years more than this old
scribbler, you will be able with little or no human encouragement to
escape excitement, lopsidedness, oddity, etc.

To Mrs. Clement Webb

Oct. i, 1920.

I had first to see Professor Kemp Smith's departure from here, late
last night, before I could get back to my letter-writing. So now at last
I can and do thank you arid your Husband very warmly for all your
manifold kindnesses. How many people you get to your house all
persons I was so very glad to meet, again or for the first time. Then
too, and indeed most of all, I liked my talks alone with you or with him,
learning much from you both, and watching, with so much interest, the
recent events of your lives and your reception of them. Thank you
then, both of you, for everything.

My Wife promises to do all she can for the dressmaking couple.
But she wants first to talk the matter over with Hildegard, who does
not get home till next Monday evening. I do not doubt that, between
them, either directly for themselves or through others, they will be
able to give or to get the couple work. But meanwhile I have agonising
questions asked me : e.g. " Does Mrs. Webb dress well ? " This is
as though the Professor were asked to explain the Binomial Theorem.
How truly humble we all ought to be !

To G. G.

Oct. 4, St. Francis's Day, 1920.

Here I am, at last, once more scribbling to you ! I have really not
missed a single day on which I could have done so. First, there was the
getting ready for Oxford a big business, because one of us four paper-
givers delayed everything by his absence abroad ; then returned to
England only to say that now (some changes having occurred while
news could not reach him) he could not, and would not, join in ; then

3io VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

let another man write a paper in his stead ; and then .when this poor
thing had actually printed his hurried contribution, paff ! came back
into the game and gave us a (fifth) paper after all ! Then last week
was very full with Oxford our five little speakers each one about his
own paper, and as to what he agreed and disagreed with in the other four
papers this on Sunday, September 26th, with Mr. Balfour in the Chair
and speaking also, when we five had spoken. I made the first little
speech, but spoke, I was told, too fast and too shortly. Then came a
French Professor, a good friend of mine, a fervent R.C. The little
speech was excellent in its substance, but, it was generally thought, too
mathematically demonstrative in method and tone. Then followed
Professor S . , the man who had led us such a life able but very
unsatisfactory has, somehow, quite lost the sense of what religion is,
and of why we so greatly need religion. Then came Principal Jacks,
head of the Unitarian College in Oxford, who, on our subject, "The
Relation between Morals and Religion," had distressed me, by printing
in his paper that a belief in a Beloved Community (a Church without
God) was quite equivalent, as a Motive for Morality, to faith in God.
In his speech Dr. J. was chiefly busy with that very vague, Pantheistic
thinker, Professor Wildon Carr, and was thus busy in a smart journalistic
sort of way. And finally came this Professor Wildon Carr, very thin,
very abstract, a good bit hurt with Dr. Jacks. Mr. Balfour's speech
was beautiful. All morality, in the precise degree of its depth and
truth, consists in a continuous and an increasing sacrifice of lower motives
for higher and ever higher motives. Yet we cannot, we do not, make
such great searching sacrifices for nothing, into the blue. We make
them, we can make them, only to reality ; and the highest motive, love,
demands and finds that Reality to be the highest possible Reality, love,
God. Hurrah !

It had been planned that then objections would be raised to these
six speeches ; and that each of the six speakers would have ten minutes
for reply. But nothing of this came about. For two Frenchmen now
managed to break in the one, to explain and defend the non-religious
moral teaching in the French State School; and the other to try and show
that, at all times, the French State Schools had taught a Positivism.
Especially this last, a tiny little man, was interminable, and quietly con-
tinued his exposition twice after Mr. B. had pulled him up for being
well beyond the time allotted to us all. This meeting lasted three hours.
Then on Monday and Tuesday I saw many friends and new acquaint-
ances, mostly connected with the Congress. And then on Tuesday
evening my great friend, Professor Kemp Smith of Edinburgh, came
home here with me for two nights. The two full days of his stay
required all my strength for my talks with him a large, religious soul
as well as a highly trained intellect.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 311

He said a number of striking things. That the age of the largest
spiritual mortality amongst men was in middle life. That he had first
been struck with this, when a great gathering of all its past and present
students took place at Princetown University, U.S.A. You had to pass
over the young men, some of whom, indeed, looked unsettled, uncertain,
but not lost to faith and heroism, and to move on to the men in their
forties ; and, alas, how many self-centred, dried up, all to pieces, cynical
countenances ! Then what piercing insight into souls he has got !
He talked of a cultivated, clean-lived ex-R.C. Priest whom I also know,
and whom the average man would, I think, never feel to be anything but
all right : " Why, the man is all to pieces : the wish-wash of the
newspapers 'progress, etc. is all he knows or believes. All true
insight is gone." Then, too, this : " More and more I am coming to
see that the chief source of errors is subjectivism, is distrust of, disbelief
in, the natural, normal intimations of our senses, of our reason, of our
conscience, of our religious sense." And when I told him (brought
up a Presbyterian) of how one of the members of our " Religion "
society had recently asked to be allowed to appear as a " D " " De-
tached " because he had ceased to find any use-whatsoever for himself
in Churches, Sacraments, etc. : he, K. S., shivered as though pierced
by a sharp instrument.

My doings have cost me a good deal : I know why. The fact is
that, like all three of my daughters but quite unlike their Mother,
I have a very vehement, violent, over-impressionable nature, which, on
such occasions, gets ridiculously over-roused, jarred, confused. Hence
I have then a big job (quite apart from all visible doings) to drop, drop,
drop all this feverishness, and to listen, as docilely as I can, to think, will
and pray, with only " la fine pointe de 1'esprit " as St. Fra^ois de Sales
and Fenelon never weary in recommending. I tell you this because
I am sure you are much like that yourself, and hence may encourage
you along the same path of a most necessary stillness and peace. The
minute I at all attain to these dispositions, fruitfulness succeeds to fever.

I have been thinking about and praying much to-day for an American
lady in far-away Chicago who has been both comforting and alarming
me by her, entirely unsolicited communications three in number
that she is now 53 years old, wife of a University professor a man of
nobly clean life and spiritual mind, but no definite religious belief what-
soever and mother to four children of 23, 17, 14, 7 ; that till some
two years ago she herself was an Agnostic ; that then, more and more,
St. Catherine of Genoa, in my M. E., seized hold of her and the
instinct that she might still come to believe much, if only she attained
to much humility and to much love of God's poor , and, now, that she
had fairly made up her mind to submit to Rome to-day, on St. Francis'
Day, she a Frances. Her very Protestant, touching mother-in-law was

312 VON Ht) GEL'S LETTERS

in this my room with me, a week or so ago, to speak her mind and to
draw out my own. Both to the daughter-in-law in Chicago and to the
mother-in-law in London I said : that neither in that book nor in my
life did I, or do I, aim at making R.C.'s : that would be odious pre-
sumption. That God and His grace are (in various degrees, no doubt)
everywhere but specially, very especially, in Christianity. That the
presumption is always in favour of souls remaining, as to institutional
appurtenance, where they are it being God's affair to make it clear
to them if, doing their best where they are, He wants them elsewhere.
That no aesthetic etc. attraction, no preference are enough : that only
the sense of obligation in and for the particular soul should decide. The
dear old lady was very touching, but I saw quickly that even the bare
possibility that her daughter-in-law could be seeking anything but
services more gorgeous than were those of the Ritualists etc., did not,
doubtless could not, enter her head.

To Mrs. Lillle

Oct. 13, 1920.

Your own very interesting letter from on board the France reached
me just seventy-two hours ago. I would have answered sooner but
could not.

I am struck in your case, once more, with the now fairly frequent
great attraction to the Church, the Beloved Community, the world-wide
congregation of believers, with little or no attraction to indeed with
perplexity concerning Christ and even God. I have no doubt myself
that this special combination will not last, I do not mean in your life,
but amongst souls at large. The Church will again be loved for other
than itself, for Christ, love made visible, and for God, our Home. But
indeed, in your case at least, I have no arresting fear on this point.
After all, even now you love to be amongst, you wish to be one of these
not merely good people, not merely lovers of their kind but believers.
Believers in what ? Why, in Christ and God. You want these
believers because in their company you find belief possible, even easy ;
and because you feel (oh so rightly) that by belonging to them you can,
in a very real way and measure, supplement your dimness of spiritual
vision by the vividness of their seeing love. Bravo !

You will remember asking me for an introduction to any priest in
Paris I could specially recommend, and that I answered rather making
my responding or not depend upon whether or no you had been received
before you reached Paris. It is plain that you have not been I dare
say very wisely. But I think it can do no harm if I enclose a card of
introduction from me to one priest in Paris the one I can think of as

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 313

now there and known to me and likely to be able to help you in one way
or the other. You see my great light and help there was Abbe Huvelin.
And how I should have loved to introduce you to that dear Saint ! He
would have understood you better far than you have ever known your-
self, within five minutes ; and the bracing, the expansion he would
have transmitted would have remained with you as long as you lived.
But then that dear Saint has gone Home. And I do not know of any
Saint now living in Paris (depend upon it there are two or three perhaps
half a dozen about, but I do not know of them !). There is, however,
a priest a Jesuit .who unites, with remarkable completeness, a variety
of gifts and graces, alas ! not often thus operative in one and the same
personality. Pere Leonce de Grandmaison is a gentleman born, a fine
scholar, a most discriminating mind, a tactful, wise reader of the human
heart one who, I am sure, would never push anyone, condemn anyone,
complicate anyone. Even sceptics speak of him with warm respect.
If, then, you feel you would like to talk to a priest, and would wish for
assurance that it would in no case do you harm that, on the contrary,
he would be likely to understand you ; and on the other hand, you
renounce the expectation of meeting, in such a priest, one of the un-
mistakable big saints of God : Pere de Grandmaison is your man. I do
not know his present Paris address. But you will easily find it either
in the Paris Post-office directory or at the Jesuits Church in the Rue de
Sevres. But pray, pray, do not think I mean to push you to see him.
Follow your own best light as it comes to you when your soul is quiet
and humble.

If you feel inclined for one or two further spiritual books, here are
two full of the interior life, and, I think, easy to get in Paris, (i) Jean
Nicolas Grou, L'cole de Jesus-Christ. Published by Doyette, 2 vols.
Paris. (2) Quelques Direct eurs d'dmes du I'jme Siede, Abbe Huvelin.
Paris : Gabalda.

(Addresses by my Saint, written down by others. Surely the life
invisible throbs in these pages. If you are really coming to London
I shall be glad if you will bring me two copies I have only one left.)

How good and pleasant it will be to see you in London in relatively
quiet Kensington ; to have quiet talks, I hope three or four of them ;
perhaps, too, to take you to see my Carmelite daughter. But please, if
you do come over, let me know a week beforehand, so that I may
arrange for you on my free afternoons (all afternoons except Saturday
and Sunday). I much liked your Mother in her genuine simplicity and
her straightness of mind and heart.

Please pray for me and mine as I do for you and yours.

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

314 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

To G. G.

Oct. 26, 1920.

No doubt a Retreat depends somewhat on the giver of it ; yet it
really depends far more upon the simplicity and generosity of the soul that
makes the Retreat. I am sure you already know well that you must
evade all straining, all vehemence, all as it were putting your nerves into
it. On the contrary the attention wanted is leisurely expansion a
dropping gently of distractions, of obsessions, etc. ." La fine pointe de
Pesprit." That is the instrument of progress, the recipient of graces.
This old scribbler, how much of that dropping, evading gently waiting
as against his interior vehemences and uproar, a sterile and sterilising
restlessness he has to practise. Yet the practice shows him plainly
that that is what good sense and God want of him. Peace and power
come that way and only that way. I know too that you should never
strain, never directly strive to like people. Just merely drop or ignore
your antipathies. There again I have been having hurricanes of
antipathies well to keep quietly ignoring all that rumpus that is all
that God asks, and we then grow through, and on occasion of, these
involuntary vehemences. They keep us humble and watchful and
close to God. I am so glad you begin your Retreat on All Saints my
favourite Feast the Feast not only of all the heroic lovers of God
that have ever lived but the Feast of single heroic supernatural acts
even if and where they remained single. May that darling glow, that
genial sunshine of the Saints, with Christ their King in their midst,
deepen, widen, sweeten, expand, steady this darling little child.

To the Same

Nov. 23, 1920.

I am very glad you are again visiting the poor people I am sure
you have real gifts that way. I have always much regretted that my
deafness has so crippled me in that direction. I feel as if it would have
done me so much good, even though I am not sure whether I would
have had gifts that way.

As to the Fenelon, I am ever so glad that you love him so. But
indeed I felt sure you would. But I kept him back till now because
I always fear as to him just only one thing : that the reader may have
too little experience of spiritual things to perceive, under all that apparent
ease and suave simplicity, the masses of spiritual experience and of
religious wisdom. But you by now have sufficient experience to bring
to him to perceive what lots and lots he brings to you.

Among the letters I feel that perhaps those which will suit you most

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 315

and will teach you most are the letters to Sceur Charlotte de S. Cyprian.
Oh, what a lot I owe to them ; they are often, often gently ringing
through my soul. The biographical " Notice " will have made you
realise her as an ex-Huguenot a woman of great mind and the
toughest will, but naturally haughty, contemptuous of the average,
requiring to learn to lose herself in and for the average. If God, if
Christ, loves men and who can doubt it ? He loves the average very
much the poor little virtue, the poor little insight. How splendidly
F. feels in her a certain unchristian aristocraticalness of mind. Mind,
Sweet, you bathe in, you saturate yourself with, those letters.

Then there are those letters to the two Dukes (Chevreuse and
Beauvilliers) : what grand direction, as to how to lead a very full and
yet a leisurely life \ Do you notice there, St. Catherine's " one thing
at a time " ? And here there is also the insistence upon doing this one
thing always with a certain environment of peace, of non-hurry around
it. I find this double practice of golden worth ; and, in getting up of a
morning, I gently plan the day's doings, not too many of them for the
application to them of F.'s treatment. (One has, of course, to be ready
to modify one's scheme, as sudden, unexpected duties crop up in the day.
But, even so, that gentle scheme is useful.)

Do you notice one very wonderful thing in F. ? It is the combination
of a rarely light (not frivolous) a light and elastic open temperament
with an earnest will and gently concentrated determination. People as
determined and as ardent as he, usually are or become heavy, rigoristic.
And again, people as light and elastic as he, usually are or become frivolous
and corrupt. By that combination the earnestness without rigorism
he always strikes me as belonging, in his measure, to that minority of
Christian teachers who have reached closest to that same combination
in Our Lord Himself to have caught up a few drops of that genial
rain, that royally generous west wind, that gently drops and brightly
blows through the virile sunshine of His love. St. Francis is another,
and, of course, a much greater instance of that delightful paradox. The
future of religion, indeed even already its present propagation in our
poor old world, lies in it.

You are doubtless unable to keep on with the Herodotus, that may
be able to come some time later. Oh, I love him much : he is so
childlike, so quaint, so wholesome, a little like a Greek prose Chaucer,
I think. And then his general tone is so truly religious ; what a dread
he has of all arrogance, and of its blinding effects and inevitable terrible
falls !

As to Mrs. , she went off to America on Saturday,

1 3th November. We had four long talks, besides meeting twice in
Church. I think she will really persevere and will greatly grow, for
she is deeply humble and very anxious to become still more so, and

3i 6 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

possesses a remarkable self-knowledge knows how to distinguish what
in herself is a surface mood and what is underlying, often very different
genuine substance. So on the evening of her first Holy Communion
day, she said, with a mischievous smile : " I trust and believe I shall
never lose this my new, fuller light : you see, I do not think I have
ever felt so Protestant as I have done to-day ! " But I wish (it is only a
peripheral matter) that she did not put her political radicalism so high in
her scheme of things.

To G. G.

Dec. 8, 1920.

I have to thank you for three very dear good letters as always
very welcome and very carefully read. I think the following points
are those I see clear about, or as to which I have facts worth reporting
about.

i. As to Fenelon. I am delighted you love him so. He is one of
the, say, half dozen of the non-Scriptural writers who have helped me
most directly and most copiously in my own interior life a life requiring
immensely that daily, hourly, death to self. I believe that less keen and
violent natures can get harm from him : phlegmatic, drifting, inert tem-
peraments could take him wrong way on. But I doubt whether he himself,
the living man, ever harmed any soul he tried to help, and he was too
amazingly penetrative of the particular soul before him thus to harm.
The only possible exception is, I think, his cousin, Madame Guyon :
possibly by his disciple attitude towards her, he did, as a matter of fact,
help her to become still more the Quietist than she would have been
without him. Certainly it was for the purpose of covering her exceed-
ingly vague and wool-gathering expressions that in his Explications des
Maximes des Saints, he strained his own language, and got censured by
Rome for such terms. But then I have never taken him in that " livre
manque," but in these letters ; and again in these letters, as a man of
immense action and persevering energising of will, addressing souls
naturally too vehement and too intense. Taken like this I have found
him tremendously helpful. Do not hurry to return these 4 vols. . . .
I am sending you three other volumes of the Correspondence the
Letters to his Family and the mixed Letters. This because I have
found that his helpfulness was greatly increased by my realising him as
a thoroughly flesh and blood, naturally faultful individual, and as a man
to whom God was not sparing of much much trial and purification. . . .
They do, you will find, humanise, concretise one's image of him greatly ;
and here and there appears a letter, perhaps as many as a dozen all told,
which really are spiritual letters. Also, pray, especially notice and read
and re-read M. Trouson's letters that great soul, the trainer of Fenelon

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 317

at S. Sulpice. Pray note T.'s austerity, and immense ideal for F. and his
piercing analysis of his natural faults. A fine example of what I so
want my child to grasp vividly, and for good and all, that usually one
thoroughly trained spiritual soul has in the background another trained
spiritual soul as its trainer.

2. As to Du Base. I want you, Dearie, first of all to realise that
D.B. is not up to this his swan's song one of my men at all. His
books are treated as gospels by many young High Anglican clerics.
But they deeply dissatisfy me. Three ideas are with him throughout ;
and I am very confident that all three are gravely mistaken and highly
impoverishing.

(1) God and man are in the whole work of sanctification, salvation,
etc., on a strict parity. God's action never extends further than man's
action. They are not only both wanted in some degree : right. But
they are both, in actual fact, always and necessarily equal in depth and
in breadth. What stuff, what blasphemy !

(2) The possibility of Sin is a necessary part of Liberty as such.
In sheer thought, in the very nature of things, to be free to do and be
good, is to be free and do the reverse evil. No and again NO. To
be able to do, to be, evil, is a defect, a restriction on liberty. Perfect
Liberty always spontaneously, joyously wills its own perfect nature.
We should feel humbled, not only by our actual sins, but already by the
fact that we can commit such things. (This alone cuts the ground from
under all the Byronisms as childish un-reason.)

(3) There is an element of potential evil in God Himself. (This
follows, of course, incontestably from No. (2). No and again NO.
Even if I were all wrong in my trying to account for the existence of
evil in my particular solution D.B.'s should be fought to the death.

Du Bose has still further notions hardly more sound than these.
But these are surely enough. You will see then that, not as a further
specimen of a teaching I believe in, but, on the contrary, as a first
pathetically late instance of a sound spiritual yearning in contrast with
painfully reckless or at least inadequate theorisings, I have loved the
strain (the strain more than some of the actual words) of this Paper, in
so far as it hungers for the Church.

(By the way, the sad unsatisfactoriness of D.B.'s own all but lifelong
subjectivist Protestantism helps me to see how little ideal is that abound-
ing in its own sense of each of the sound currents of Protestantism
which D.B., even in this paper, tries to make out to be somehow really
satisfactory. In reality each soul requires constantly inclusiveness,
balance, sobriety, immense reverence. Its errors may get counter-
balanced in the course of history and for mankind at large, by the
contrary errors, or its incompletenesses may be made up for by the
contrary incompletenesses of other souls well but what about this

3i8 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

soul itself? And the particular sentence you quote as to the Church
as the only Christ in which we are and we can do anything by Him and
for Him I think you have spotted a seriously excessive phrase. The
Church is not Christ is no more Christ than it is God. We require
God and Christ and Church : each in and with the other. But it ruins
the whole richness, indeed the truth, of the outlook, if any one of these
especially if the Church is simply identified with either of the other
two. But there you have a just, a small touch of D.B.'s weakness
which in his books runs riot he overstates till he meets, implies, the
very opposite of what he started out to defend.)

To Professor Friedrich Heller
(Translated from German)

March 1921.

I heard a few days ago from Dr. Brilioth at Upsala that you had
just become Professor in Marburg, but I will still direct this letter to
the address at Munich which you gave me.

Please pardon that I did not follow my first impulse, and acknow-
ledge immediately by a postcard the receipt of your book, Das Gebet.
I wished to consider seriously at least something in it, before I wrote
to thank. And so, alas, almost two months have flown by the book
with the friendly greeting arrived here on the 313! January before
I send only one word to you. Pray, pray, forgive me, and many,
many thanks too for your manifold, very adequate appreciation of my
Mystical Element. I have, even now, only gone through the two
Forewords and the Introduction ; the idea of prayer in divine service ;
and then the essential nature of prayer, but all this with close at-
tention, and with manifold thinking out. But also now, for want of
a serious knowledge of the central mass of your great work, I am wanting
in the fullest possible knowledge of your position in the dominant parts.
Much labour of my own, stiff labour on mostly quite different subjects,
forbids me for a long time yet, to work through this central mass.
I have, quite possibly, misunderstood in this or that point, and, where
I am not at present of your opinion, I shall greatly rejoice if it proves
that I have wrongly understood you.

It has always been difficult to me to say " No " ; indeed, where
I admire much, it is altogether painful to me. And I do much and
deeply admire your book, on many grounds, but especially because it is
so through and through religious, autonomous, transcendental, meta-
physical, realistic bravo, bravissimo ; and it, at once liberally, histori-
cally, critically and psychological-philosophically, strives to penetrate,
and to represent, the object. And to that contributes a plenitude of less

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 319

expanded points of view which refresh and delight me as beautifully
true and striking. But, in spite of that, the " No," alas, will not allow
itself to be suppressed, and concerns two or three really closely connected
points, which not seldom trouble and limit my otherwise pure joy.

More or less everywhere your conviction shows itself that the
great religious geniuses, although in grateful connection with their
spiritual predecessors thanks much for this noble insight know
nothing, all the same, of actual concrete things (" dinglichen ")
dinglich is my own word, but it expresses, I think, not incorrectly
your view.

But then at once I find it otherwise with the Baptist and Paul,
and even with Jesus Himself in that phrase in the Lukan history
of His childhood, exactly where it seems to be fully historical, ra
TOU TOXTpo (JLOU "My Father's House," the Temple. Thither,
to something local, actually concrete, the Jesus Child is powerfully
drawn. And, as the last action of the earth-life of Jesus, we find Him
purifying this same Temple in high indignation He risks His life in
so doing. Yet in both cases, not as accommodation to the lower,
local, material standpoint of the masses, but, quite surely, as animated
Himself by this " superstition," the Temple is to Him something
especially holy. What, again, of the long fast of Jesus not unhistorical,
is it ? And yet, if historical, not something unconcrete (undingliches] ?
Then, again, the Baptism of Jesus ? There something material
(dinglich) is present, and the contact with this concrete thing is not
simply the expression of already present fulness of grace, but rather
works with it towards the production of a growth of spiritual life. What
was the hem (or seam) (virtue) of the garment of Jesus ? The best
expositors see in it the two lower of the four tassels of the sky-blue zizith
robe which every law-zealous Jew at that time wore. But it is a Thing,
is it not ? Again, Jesus heals the blind man not simply through prayer.
He takes clay and kneads it, and wets it with His spittle, and lays it on
the eyes of the blind man only after that come prayer and healing.
I think, in face of all this the facts are similar in the case of Paul the
religious life of the Greatest appears actually free from that subtlety
and doctrinairism of Luther's, which indeed permits the purely spiritu-
ally awakened belief to express itself in sensual forms, but strictly forbids
anything sensual or factual to be used as a means to stimulating the
spiritual. But what a curious Psychology, unassociated with God's
world, if not absolutely turned away from it, which allows me, for
instance, to kiss my child because I love it, but strictly forbids me to
kiss it in order to love it. Why not this latter ? Is, then, the sensual
necessarily a blind alley ? Does it then derive from the Devil, or even
from Papistry ? Is it not coming from God too, intended for the
spiritual, and to be used as a bridge to the spiritual, as well as from

320 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

the spiritual ? Why should, how should, my senses, my body, remain
outside, when I pray ? I shall find later, I hope, that you do not mean
actually this. It will rejoice me immensely to find that you introduce
no such subtleties into what is most deeply and purely Christian.

Beautiful and to me deeply contenting is your whole chapter on the
Divine-service-common-prayer in early Christendom (pp. 470, etc.),
and also the first six lines of paragraph 8, " the Divine-service-prayer
in the Catholic Church."

Especially dear to me are the sections I and 2, pages 474476 ; the
whole is thought out, lived through, represented with high mastery.
The four lines at the end of paragraph 2, page 476, " It is an indubitable
Biblic-divine service " (Wortgottesdiensf), are (fifty years have most
deeply convinced me of that) powerfully, strikingly true. But it is
really remarkable to me to see what a conclusion you draw from the
admission just made. For a religious realist and metaphysician like you,
this admission would seem to end the controversy, and to end it too in
favour of the Catholic Sacramental Divine service. But not at all
the controversy is indeed ended, but who would have predicted it ?
(pp. 467476) in favour of the Protestant Biblic-divine service. For
now it is said, " the Evangelical common Divine service, that is, the
sacrificeless, spiritual worship of God through an assembly of Christian
personalities," remains the Ideal of Divine service. Are, then, Life
and Truth so sharply opposed to each other ? That more and more
fervid prayer, is not that the fact, which you hold to be indubitable,
decisive ? Why, generally, is the pure spiritual worship of God the
highest form of the cult ? Those ripe Christian personalities bring, all
the same, their bodies and senses with them, even to the highly spiritual
assembly. Why should not also the sense-activity, and the beautiful,
creaturely, plain, humble acknowledgment of the utility of such activity,
be brought into the Ideal of the cult for all men ? Is Docetism true for
the Incarnation ? And if it is false, why is its equivalent true for the
Divine service ? For such highly cultivated gentlemen, is not subtlety,
fastidiousness, and miseries like those is not all this a real danger ?
And is not precisely the .sensual element of the Cult the right remedy
for that ? Just as that which strikes the senses in the Incarnation
appears, according to St. Augustine, as sanans tumor em et nutriens amor em ?
If so with him, why not also with us ?

I perceive how you (229 and elsewhere) explain the great word of
the fourth Gospel as to prayer, the " worship in spirit and in truth,"
as relating to the exclusion of all that is sensual (sinnlicK). But, in good
historical criticism, this absolutely cannot be carried through. These
words form part of a through and through sacramental document, which
holds before us, in the dialogue with Nicodemus, the water baptism and
its strong necessity, and, in the great speech at Capernaum, the Bread

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 321

(and Wine) of the Eucharist as spiritual partaking of the Flesh and
Blood of Jesus, and, again, the necessity of this partaking ; and then, in
the opening of the side of Jesus and the forth flowing of the water and
the blood, Jesus represents to us the origin of the two chief Sacraments.
So also, with regard to the subordination of even the ripest spiritual
personalities beneath the Bearer of the outer, visible Church authority,
the beloved disciple waits to enter the open, empty sepulchre until Peter,
the more tardy-paced, himself arrives. The beloved disciple then first
goes into the monument, after and behind Peter.

I remark, lastly, only one more thing in your rarely rich book.
When you have come, with Christian Mysticism, down to its mediaeval
representatives, you make their dependence upon Plotinus, really Proclus
(pseudo-Dionysius), stand out very distinctly. I also believe, with you,
that Proclus has often been utilised too fully, and that he then seduced
to agnosticism and pantheism. But you scarcely even allow an
Augustine or Francis of Assisi to pass. I think that there must be
something wrong in your methods, that you do not allow these great
ones simply to stand as such. Here, in the case of Augustine at least,
we have to deal with the very great and tender Plotinus, in all that does
not directly belong to Christianity. But, and this is what I wish to
express, you seem not at all to consider that no less strong parallel de-
pendence of the Johannine Gospel on the philosophy of Philo (derived
from Plato). Yet this is a clearly demonstrable fact. But if that is so,
and you maintain the Johannine Gospel as a genuine, deeply Christian
writing (and the opposed judgment would be too eccentric), then, in
principle, there is nothing to object to Augustine or Suso. And I be-
lieve that is the one truly tenable, circumspect position which we have
to take.

I allow myself to send two closely connected essays of mine, as to
" Religion and Illusion " and " Religion and Reality," in order to
emphasise very strongly those things which, thank God, we have so
deeply and truly in common, and that which holds us much more than
we hold it. I would also gladly send you my book Eternal Life, but
do not know whether you do not already, perhaps, possess it.

Once more many, many thanks, and best happiness and fairest
blessing for your researching and creating.

To J. M. (a Girl)

Epiphany, 1921.

I got my Communion, on this most

ancient, very hopeful Feast, this morning specially for you

And I then saw you so vividly before me in the two conditions of soul
and of action which at all times express to me your deepest, truest

y

322 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

personality and call to me. The one is my Child amidst the little
poilus, in her self-oblivious Nursing Motherhood. Indeed I see you
doing there thing upon thing a slipping away from all self, indeed even
all regulations, to do more and other than they acts unknown to us,
forgotten by yourself, but which live on in God Who prompted them
and Whom you followed. This I love so to remember just now when
you are paying the cost of all that devotion, for thus I see how even
this illness is not too much to pay for things as darling as are those.

And then there stood vividly before me the occasion a good while
back was it four years ago ? when you asked me whether I thought
you might go to Holy Communion ? that you had not been for a
while and had let yourself drift, and were afraid of your unworthiness.
Oh ! I just loved that : not, of course, the past drifting in itself,
but the humility and frankness and, above all, the sense of need of that
dear strength not your own. I remember this second, this directly
religious, state of soul, just now, Blessing, because, you see, I want you
to be doing all the wise things, all that will help you get well ; because
I am sure that that incident represents your permanent deepest self, even
if this self had been buried away for twenty years instead of five at most
and at worst ; because your illness is, of course, primarily nervous,
psychic, sub-conscious, so that whatsoever brings full order and appro-
priate articulation to your deepest self will directly promote recovery ;
and finally because to restart that, your quite simple but very central
religious and self-watching, God-dependent practice and life will reach
deeper down into you and help you more than even all the severally
good and necessary other interests and activities of your life, taken alone.
I know well, of course, from my own personal experience, that
the longer and the more one has been slack or has turned away from
the Inner Pleadings, the more it is (or rather seems to involve) a huge
effort to start all again. So that, if we are in weak health, we say : "I
will get well first, and then I will consider this matter and other serious
things." No, no : that is to put the cart before the horse. We require
interior harmony and happiness as a cause precedent to health and opera-
tive towards health, a harmony and happiness which even abounding
physical health alone can never give us, and which only great fidelity
to our best lights and a humble return to Christ's feet, if and when we
have drifted away from them, can ever really bring to us.

Of course our religion will, especially when we are thus physically,
nervously weak, have to be kept and taken very simple, elastic, small in
its concentrated doses. No long services nor sermons. Only just Holy
Communion. But this you could manage, I think, on most Sundays,
at some twelve o'clock H.C. Service, after your breakfast in bed. And
your spiritual preparation should be very simple and childlike, as
much as possible a quiet rumination from the heart, looking in large

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 323

masses at your past, present, and proximate life as to what dispositions
and actions Christ may want you to reform or to practise. Then at
His feet you get your strength. And then follows the week of humble,
gentle practice of your resolutions, with little peaceful turnings to Christ
to help you keep them or to forgive you when you fail in them.

You will thus (and thus alone) get a unity and drama, a reality and
awakeness, a depth, steadiness and tenderness into your life which nothing
else ever can or will of itself supply. All will spring up afresh, green
and delightful. Your very expression, certainly your health, will gain
a repose and a zest delicious to behold.

I noticed close to your door, immediately on the other side of the
Cathedral, St. Andrew's Church; look, Dearie, there, at the Notice
Board, and if there is Holy Communion marked there for 1 2 o'clock
or so on Sundays, do you slip out, without telling anyone, especially
without listening to your raison raisonnante slip out as you used to do
to help others in the War and get your Holy Communion then.

When I come on Monday I will not say, nor expect, one word
about this whole matter. Only let me say here now that simply nothing
you could ever do will give me so complete a joy as if you thus give
the secondary part of you the slip and if you thus restart, more deliberately
and circumspectly than ever, your building up of interior unity in the
daily watch and ward against the false self.

At the Fishmongers I often admire the way in which they slit up
soles from head to tail even the slimmest soles. Such division leaves
these fishes truly broken up. Yes, because they are but fishes soles,
not souls. For as to souls, human souls, these, wonderful to relate, do
not even begin to attain to their true unity, indeed they are not really
awake, until they are divided up until the spirit within them begins
to discriminate itself against the petty self.

In the Scottish rivers the salmon will leap and leap, and only after
much leaping will they succeed in jumping up and into the higher
reaches. Jump, Child, jump : / jump with you, look, we both
manage it !

Loving old Fatherly one.

To G. G.

Jan. 29 and Feb. 2, 1921.

I think of you as back at and, in any case, ready for a letter.

I have had to be a bit long before getting to this one, but have not a bit
forgotten you, Dear. There are three things or four that I specially
want to write about this time. i. Your music. I still await light on
this point. For, on the one hand, it does look as if the necessary amount
of violin practice were straining to the head ; yet, on the other hand,
this music-producing is such a unique vehicle of self-expression for you.

324 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

I should be so loth to see you give it up. The crux of the difficulty lies
evidently in the amount the large amount of practice necessary for
your otherwise stiff fingers. If, say, an hour or i \ hours a day were
sufficient that would not seriously strain the head. But then you
seem to be sure that that would not be enough ! . . .

A couple of attempts to help souls seem to have gone awry with
me just now : I mention the cases because you will, sooner or later,
doubtless yourself have more or less similar experiences. One was of
an Italian man friend of about 45 an immense reader and somewhat
intemperately speculative mind a man who came back to Christianity,
indeed to the R.C. Church, from wildly secularist Socialism some 8 years
ago. I had built great hopes for him from a Jesuit Retreat which
I suggested his making. At last he went and made one, the other day.
But the Priest who gave him the Retreat, an American, though a very
good man, rather turned it into a series of theological speculations or
discussions than that he kept it, and made it into directly practical
instructions in Prayer, Meditation, Training of the Conscience, Dis-
covery and Reformation of Personal Faults, etc., etc. which is, of
course, the direct object and function of a Retreat. I do not think
those four full days have damaged my man, but they fed just his specula-
tive bent which I hoped would be starved, and have starved his devotional
needs and chances which I hoped would be fed. Ah, well God may
be offering him chances I do not see or know of. He is a well-intentioned
man, and God will bless even unlikely-looking happenings.

Then there is a young English lady, artist, who adored her mother,
who had no religion, or who had lost what she had had. This damsel
came to stay for three nights a few days ago, and to our surprised pleasure
seemed definitely religious in her outlook And she wrote me so
enthusiastic a letter about my " Christianity and the Supernatural "
especially as to my tact with young people that I thought I could and
ought to say something about religion to her ; so I wrote her a careful
answer dwelling on the importance of cultivating this her religious sense,
just as she cultivated her artistic sense ; on the great Jewish-Christian-
Mohammedan tradition of prayer for the Dead which she might get
into the habit of for her Mother ; and on the great importance of,
whenever reasonably possible, only preliminary judgments. This last
point because I had tried to introduce her to Browning's poetry
entirely unknown to her till I read aloud to her some six of his noblest
easier pieces ; and had found that she judged straight away and finally
and with an angry hostility. As I pointed out, she could not, at that
stage, know more than that, so far, she did not like him after all, a very
small fact, and one that might well be overcome on further acquaintance
with writings which seniors of hers, well qualified to judge, had come to
reckon of the rarest depth and richest delight. But this letter was

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 325

answered by a curt, dry little note, telling me she had done all the things
I proposed, now during several years. I was glad in a way, for surely
even without any self-knowledge she must know whether or not she
has gone to Holy Communion, often, indeed if possible every Sunday,
and whether she has done at least 15 minutes spiritual Reading every
day. But then it was strange to note that she said " all the things,"
whilst it is clear that the suspense-of-any-avoidable-final-judgment
practice has certainly not been done for several years. Ah, well :
it does not follow that that letter was no use at all ; and, in any case, one
did one's little best.

Three dear friends have died since I last wrote two of them
quite old : fine old Dr. Alexander Whyte, the Presbyterian Edinburgh
preacher and writer, a man with much of the Catholic mind in sur-
roundings which made its utterance difficult, and really something
of a saint ; and fine old Lady Stawell (pronounced Stowell), a sweet
strong serene Anglican, a devoted Christian. She had many a trouble,
but her heroic resignation to God's holy will, her generous and strongly
gentle application of her faith to her entire life and dispositions never
left her to the last ; and when I saw her lying dead on Sunday, the
countenance was indeed beautiful in its triumphant spirituality. These
two friends were respectively in their middle eighties and late nine-
ties. But the third friend was only just 50 > and he was carried off
instantaneously by angina pectoris. He was a very devoted, very
popular, immensely active Jesuit priest the man who gave me hospi-
tality in the Jesuit house of studies these last four years at Oxford. He
was essentially a man of action, full of social service work. Well, that
is necessary too necessary that some, with the gift for it, should labour
much at it. His devoted bull-dog Jimmy is sure to feel his master's
death deeply : they were inseparables, day and night. . . .

I guess my Sweet has a time of dryness, of darkness, on. Well,
these are times of great fruitfulness, provided we will be patient,
force nothing, change no regulation, decide nothing capable of being
put off, but gently busy ourselves with such other things as your
Greek, etc. . . .

To Professor Clement Webb

March 7, 1921.

Let me first explain that, though I wrote yesterday an, I dare say
robust-sounding, note of acceptance to speak (I hope) alongside of the
Bishop of Winchester at the Summer School (Swanwick) on July 3
next : this is really a plucky, perhaps impudent, action of mine. For
here I am, now a full week, in my bedroom with a chest and head cold
which refuses to go, and which has stopped my loved composition work

326 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

for the time. The Doctor has been called in for to-day and I hope
he will be able to expedite this unwelcome, tenacious thing. I say
this to excuse my long delay in answering your most kind and very
helpful letter, and again the (inevitable) inadequacy of this reply.

As to your criticism of my Heiler Paper, I will carefully follow
up the valuable distinction you propose. For the present I am too
brain-tired to see more than just, quite generally, the bigness of the
problem you disclose. For, surely, that (at least apparent) sheer indif-
ference of the Synoptic Jesus to any and all symbolic and liturgical acts,
places, times, His apparent scorn of the very notion that any intrinsic
morality or obligation can or could possibly attach to their observation :
this is an utterly unoriginal trait of His life and teaching. Amos, the
First Isaiah, etc., are at least as emphatic. It is the Prophetic manner,
the Prophetic geste par excellence. Now I find it most difficult to believe
that those Hebrew Carlyles and Lamennaises men who could not
touch a subject without lighting it up indeed, yet also not without
burning up its substance by the perhaps necessary, but none the less
most dangerous exaggerations meant literally all they said. Amos and
Proto-Isaiah shout defiances which (if pressed as substantive truths)
mean nothing less than that if a man leads a humble God-fearing life and
offers sacrifice and observes the Sabbaths and New Moons : such an one
is mixing together things dear to God and things hateful to Him ! As
if the large history of those symbolic and ritual things were reasonably
explicable without the admission that something of the kind is useful,
is indeed necessary for that inseperably mixed, spirit and sense, creature,
man ! And as if, precisely, a good man, if once he were away both from
abuses and from abuse, would not be able to come to feel these things
to be connected with his, never really unilateral, wants. I don't in a
word believe these Prophets meant quite as much as they actually
said ; and, again, I do not see how we historians and philosophers of
religion can follow them in full, even if they do mean all they say. After
all, there are other prophets combining in fine proportions the priest
with the prophet Ezekiel and Malachi give us some glorious outlooks.
And the great Deutero-Isaiah and the sublime Ebed-Jahve poet, if they
do not formally rescind the harshnesses of the earlier polemic, at least
do not prod it up.

I feel then that your point (very interesting and very important
though it be) will have to be classed not with the problems special to
Our Lord (Proximate Second Coming, Suffering Messiah, etc.), but with
those taken over and continued by Him (Messiah's First Coming,
Diabolical Possessions and Exorcisms, catastrophic End of World, etc.).
But all this is, of course, but a tiny prolegomenon to a very big subject.
Grateful thanks, once more !

By the bye, you may be interested to hear that Dr. R. Guiran,

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 327

Professor of Theology of the Swiss Free Church (no doubt Calvinist)
in the University of Lausanne, writes to me : " Je ne saurais assez vous
remercier de m'avoir envoye votre etude sur Heiler, si penetrante, et
qui met en lumiere un point de vue auquel notre education reformee et
d'enfants du Reveil religieux ne nous a pas prepares, mais dont je pressens
depuis longtemps et de plus en plus la profonde verite." This has,
naturally, cheered me up, whilst Archbishop Soderblom keeps me limp
and modest by warning me that my Oxford " Supernatural " Address
is quite un-Evangelical, that his Swedish people would not stand it, etc.
Well : the good man is far more moderate than Amos and Proto-Isaiah
are on the other question Amos and Proto-Isaiah whom I recognise
as inspired beyond even (!) Luther, not to speak of this Lutheran
Archbishop !

To Professor Clement Webb

May 1921.

As to the historic Jesus, His attitude to ceremonial and material
mediations, and again His attitude towards Celibacy (a new point brought
forward here in your letter), let me take the Celibacy first. Here I am
a little surprised that you ignore Matthew xix. 10-12, which, surely, is
as emphatic a recommendation of celibacy (as the heroic call for a few)
and as full of admiration of such celibacy as any one could desire. I have
once more looked up the matter in my ever dear H. T. Holtzmann,
who, convinced Lutheran Protestant though he was, managed to keep
his outlook astonishingly historical and objective. And I find, as I re-
membered, that he has not the smallest doubt as to the passage going
back to the historic Jesus Himself, to have been really spoken by Him ;
no doubt, again, that it means a warm recommendation for some of
celibacy ; and finally that this recommendation is backed by the actual
deliberately chosen celibacy of Jesus Himself and this standing, as it
does, between the (equally not accidental) celibacy of the Baptist and the
explicit recommendation and practice of St. Paul the greatest of the
Apostles. Holtzmann also refers to the Christian Ascetics of the
Revelation of St. John xiv. 4. Let me explain that when, in my
" Christianity and the Supernatural," etc., I have spoken or written
with some polemical edge about these matters, I had not (in any degree
or way, however indirect) my friend Webb or indeed any Anglican in
my mind (except Charles Kingsley, not felt as typically Anglican at all).
It is only now that these things have been spoken by me, without thought
of yourself at all, that I think of you in connection with them (had
I been stopped by someone and asked : " Well, yes, but what about
Webb ? " I would, I think, have said, that, for aught I knew, you were
with me in this matter). No : the people I did have in view were

328 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

certainly not all not my great Troeltsch yet some (the more charac-
teristically Lutheran) Lutherans. I thought and think, e.g., of one of
the quite recent, mostly remarkably balanced, "Folksbiicher" on various
religious historical and doctrinal points, sold by the tens of thousands just
before the War. The one on " Christianity and the Sex Life " roused
my ire. This coolly ignored the Baptist altogether ; explained that
St. Paul, in this question, was, unfortunately, "nicht evangelisch" ;
and here comes the (to me odious) vulgarity and naturalism as to
Jesus, " how do we know that He did not have some pretty love affair ?
We know so little of His life ; how dare we deny the possibility of such
richness for Him ? " No, no : on this point Schopenhauer was quite
right : the animus on this point of Luther is (allow him every excuse)
is, objectively, as far as it goes, a dethronement of the supernatural !

I do not, of course, mean, for a moment, that this covers any and every
law of celibacy for the Clergy or even for monks alone. Nor, again, do
I forget that the opposite dangers are also most real, and, in a true sense,
more fatal I mean the danger of throwing suspicion upon marriage,
as somehow not intrinsically quite right. I believe that the doctrine
of the Virgin Birth has at least lent itself, pretty easily and pretty often,
to such unwholesomeness. But anything of the kind at once weakens
the beauty, not only of marriage, but of celibacy as well. And that
the combination of the two poles, the Heroic and the Homely each
holy, with marriage as a strict duty for mankind at large, and with
celibacy as a call for the few : that this gives a richer, more elastic,
though certainly more difficult, outlook ; and that it is, not indeed the
outlook of Kingsley or of Luther, but the outlook of Jesus : of these
two points I see no serious reason for doubting at all.

What I have just been writing will explain, I hope, why I attach
greater weight to Our Lord's words and acts on this point than I do to
what we can gather as to His attitude towards ceremonial and material
mediations. Christianity, for me, is essentially, centrally, a heroism :
you can have this heroism completely with the ceremonial and the
material mediations as full and as fixed as they are now in Rome ; but
you cannot, to my mind, have the heroism as proclaimed, as central and
as poignant, without the celibacy as you can with it. And, again, the
Prophetic freedom as to that ceremonial and the material mediations gets
markedly curtailed already by St. Paul : indeed, if Jesus really performed
the Eucharistic acts and meant anything like what St. Paul holds they
meant then Jesus Himself inaugurated (and this as part of the legacy
of His Passion) such a deliberate curtailment. But the matter stands
quite clear in the other case. The attitude of St. Paul towards celibacy
is the very attitude proclaimed, practised, chosen for His own life, by
Jesus. Is it wrong to dwell with special joy and emphasis upon points
thus traditional in the clearest way ?

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 329

I have also, in reconsidering the Synoptic texts, been struck with the
more-than-non iconoclastic temper of Jesus. Thus where He is only
asked to touch the sick man, He more than touches, He makes a liniment
of clay and His spittle and lays this, with prayer, upon the sick part.
Also, how far the Expectation of His own Proximate Second Coming
helps towards treating lightly the Sabbath, etc., may be well unfixable.
But I do not see how it could well fail to have some influence ; whilst
the Prophets, whom Jesus revives, were very certainly largely influenced
by the sense of Taboo which still clung to most of the ceremonial acts
they reacted, went as strongly, against what was institutionally fixed
in the religion of their day.

To G. G.

Ascension Day, May 5, 1921.

... It was only late on Tuesday night, 3rd, that the big strain
came to an end, through the delivery of my Address on " Suffering in
God." The thing was, as it were externally, a success : 26 of us met
together a large number for our not large society. 1 And they were
all, as ever, most kind and dear to me personally. But I trust it is
sincerely so one feels, on such occasions, more cheered by agreement
in the convictions expressed, than by any amount of such pleasant
attentions. Some 1 2 of my listeners spoke through my machine after
and on the Paper ; and only 2 agreed with my fundamental to me such
a clear, dear, and important point : that although, of course, God is
full of sympathy and care for us ; and though we cannot succeed vividly
to represent His sympathy otherwise than as a kind of suffering, we
must not press this to mean that suffering, what we experience in our
own little lives as suffering, is as such and literally in God. God is over-
flowing Love, Joy, and Delectation. I showed, I think, many and
grave reasons as warnings against importing, or admitting suffering
in God. I gave a detailed instance of ruin effected in a fine mind and
in all his outlook in a man who began with that one eccentricity real,
literal suffering in God.

To the Same

May 19, 1921.

... I well understand what you feel about religion, suffering, and
caring. But please notice carefully and for a general principle of wise
judgment, that religion, on its human side, in so far as it is a human

1 The London Society for the Study of Religion. The address of which
only a portion was actually read is published in the second series of Essays and
Addresses (1926).

330 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

activity is subject to excesses and defects, to diseases and aberrations
more or less special to itself, but which no more prove anything against
religion at its best religion as it is on God's side than do the corre-
sponding excesses and defects, deflections and diseases of Art, of Science,
of Politics, of Marriage, prove aught against these kinds of life and of
reality, taken at their best and in their intendedness on God's side.
I possess a French medical psychologist's very instructive yet danger-
ously plausible really anti-religious book, Les Maladies du Sentiment
Religieux. As a matter of fact, for his mind (perhaps unbeknown to
himself), religion, the whole of religion, is these "Maladies." We live
in times of such obvious transition, decline, poverty of deep, creative
conviction, of such excess of analysis over synthesis that it is in the air
all around us to ask questions, to poke about, to wonder, to drift, to use
the microscope, where to become and to be, to produce reality, to adore
and to will and to see things in the large, and upon the whole, and
at their best, is what we all require.

As to religion and caring for our dear ones, I enclose for you to keep
the glorious profession of faith and of love of St. Bernard on occasion
of the death of his half-brother and fellow Cistercian (= strict Bene-
dictine) monk Gerard. The entire sermon is most touching. But
is not this bit vibratingly beautiful ? I have translated it as well as
I could ; but it has lost, alas, a good deal in the process !

I shall not be sendingyou, Sweet, that "Suffering and God" Address,
at least not typed, after all. I found on reflection, and after getting some
letters from hearers of it, that it was little or no use to publish the thing
as it stands that it really requires, for such as do not already hold its
views, an entire new section, a section which would draw out the right
principles and proper method for such an enquiry. You see, young
people always just go ahead on such points, as though they were talking,
say, of Sargent's portraits or of Drinkwater's plays, or at least of things
which we can hold, overlook, comprehend. But as to God, we can
indeed be sure, very sure of Him He is implied in all our thinking,
feeling, willing, doing ; it is the implicit faith in the reality and the
aweful work of truth, of goodness, of life which will never die out for
long amongst mankind. And we can, we do, gain vivid experiences of
Him, if only we will die, die, day and night, to self. We can thus
increasingly apprehend Him can know really about Him, the Real,
the source of all reality and of all sense of reality. But we cannot
encircle Him, map Him out, exhaustively explain Him. We cannot
really say, as these objectors cheerfully argued : " If He feels joy, He
must also feel pain " : we cannot, for we thus assume that we are
dealing with a fellow human being ; that by " feeling " in God we
mean no other, no more, than by " feeling " in man. Nor can we
argue, as another pressed upon me, that he would break his heart, if his

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 331

only son took to an impure life ; how much more then must God break
His heart, if and when any of us gravely sins. We cannot so argue,
because here again we do not encircle, penetrate God ; and because we
must not press points in ways and degrees which could contradict certain
other, and really deeper, intimations and requirements of the religious
sense. Now the deepest intimation and requirement we really have
got though sadly weakened in many of us by the fever and rush of life
since about A.D. 1 790 is Being (as distinct from Becoming), is Perfection
(as distinct from Attempting), is indeed Action but not Change. Of
course change in ourselves, in the sense of becoming better and better in
all things ; but this this need of change in us comes simply from our
imperfection. We are not God. Yet how we need Him ! And this,
then, not as just a larger ourselves, not as a larger Becoming, but as
Being, as Joy Pure and Undefiled.

Now this, with the St. Bernard which I will now copy for you,
must do for to-day, my Child.

To Bernard Holland

June 9, 1921.

Your touchingly intimate letter, for which I thank you heartily,
deserved an earlier answer. But much has crowded into my life during
these last weeks much that could not be put off at all. Here, however,
I am at last, scribbling to you my little reflections and proposals in
connection with what you tell me.

As to you and your girls' time abroad, I am so very glad it went off
so well. It was evidently a genuine refreshment for yourself ; and as
to those two young minds and hearts, what an education one indeed
that will only grow gradually, as they come to digest and to incorporate
into their moral life how many a scene and experience in part but slightly
noticed at the time. They really cannot be too grateful to their parents
for the alertness and the self-sacrifice with which these parents have
seen to their getting these experiences so soon and so thoroughly.

I was truly sorry not to be in when Verena came round here the
other day. I had had a bad night, and was tonicking my brain and
nerves, with Pucky for companion. Pray tell her that I am only too
glad that the Murray was of so much use, and that I do not mind at all
its showing a little of the help it has been to them. Also that I shall
be glad indeed to hear her chief impressions and to ask her questions
concerning the great scenes she has been witnessing. So I hope she
will try again, if possible some afternoon from 4.30 onwards. But not
Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. As to what you tell me about her vocation,
or, at least, her desire to try, I well understand your feelings, which
assuredly are just right. For you are fully willing, indeed proud, she

332 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

should thus give herself to God in an especially self-renouncing way ;
you are happy, you see how happy such a vocation, where really genuine,
really is, even for this short earthly life of ours ; and yet you feel, you
anticipate the wrench, the sacrifice it will be for yourself, in a way
especially. You know, of course, Montalembert's pages in his Moines
d 1 Occident, about his daughter's (his favourite, his secretary) vocation
that too to the Sacred Heart Order. I used to think these pages perfect ;
I do not think so now, because they have, I believe, a good deal of
French (modern French) sentimental rhetoric about them. Yet their
existence remains most touching and most true. And it is this, a quite
similar substance, that you are experiencing now. I too, as you say,
have had to go through this with less likeness to your case than was
Montalembert's experience. For though I loved and love Thekla
dearly, yet it was Gertrud who held with me the position that your
Verena and Montalembert's daughter hold and held with you two
Fathers. Yet see how deeply, deeply we are called to God's Holy will ;
the daughter that I specially gave to God remains, quite accessible to
us all still ; whereas the daughter that seemed left to us in the ordinary
life has already been called home.

I quite understand your feeling that, with so unusually level-headed,
sensible and peaceful a character as Verena's, there appears no definite
reason why you should delay her trying. Yet I should like to put one,
or rather two points, entirely ready though I am to find you overruling
their suggestions. I mean that I shall not dream of thinking you
unwise if you feel that reasons on the other side outweigh these sug-
gestions. My two points, then, are as follows. Thekla waited till she
was close on 21, and then asked me to let her go and try her vocation,
immediately after this birthday of hers, with the Carmelites. She
pointed out most accurately (as I have since observed) that the life of a
Carmelite nun was so qui se perd, so intolerable, to one without a definite
vocation to it, that the risk of imagining a vocation, whilst there did not
really exist such a vocation, was at a minimum that there was far less
a risk of such a mistake there than with practically any of the modern
Orders, with their " mixed," i.e. largely active, life.

From this there follow my two points : (i) Would it not, perhaps,
be well to get Verena to wait till she is 21, or say 20 ? And (2) is it not
true that this might be, not less, but more desirable, with her apparent
vocation (i.e. to a mixed and largely active Order), than with such a
" pure " or contemplative vocation as Thekla's ? . . .

VON HOGEL'S LETTERS 333

To Professor Rene Guiran, of Lausanne

Ce ii juillet 1921.

Cher Monsieur, Pardonnez, je vous prie, ce vilain papier ; c'est
cause de son commode format que je le prends pour vous repondre.

Vous me demandez, au fond, une difficile question. J'ai vecu,
spirituellement, cette cinquantaine d'annees, autant, et plus, au fond
plus du mot parle, de la vie vecue au devant de moi par tel de mes
mattres, directeurs, confidents, exemples, amis, que de n'importe quel
livre. Ce sont ces influences toutes vivantes, toutes directes, la,, qui
m'ont fait croire a la veracite des livres spirituelles, m'ont donne un
certain sens de leurs merites si inegales, et enfin m'ont fait un peu
comprendre ce qu'ils voulaient dire. Puis, pour les livres, ce sont les
vieux livres en gros, bien plus que les recents, qui m'ont nourri et forme.
Ou trouver des livres recents pleinement comparables, je ne dis pas aux
Psaumes ou aux EVangiles, mais aux Confessions de St. Augustin, aux
Sermons sur le C 'antique des C antiques de St. Bernard, ou a L' Imitation
de Jesus-Christ ?

Et, en dernier lieu, je crains que je vais vous recommander un bon
nombre de livres que vous chercherez en vain chez les libraires ou en
les bibliotheques. De ceux-ci je pourrais vous preter, non pas tous,
mais la plupart.

Veuillez noter que je remonte jusqu'a 1870, mais pas au dela ; et
encore, que je ne cite que des livres possedant une certaine vitalite
spirituelle notable : je ne pense, directement, ni aux belles lettres, ni
a 1'erudition. Mais avant de commencer, encore une reflexion generate,
s'il vous plait.

Vous me dites que vous aimez les Modernistes ; et moi, j'ai eu
j'ai encore parmi plusieurs qui furent nommes, ou qui restent etiquetes
tels de bien chers amis. Aussi ceux qui aiment les etiquettes (moi-
meme j'en ai une grande crainte) n'ont point manque, assez souvent, de
me classer, moi aussi, comme moderniste. Mais il me semble clair que
toute 1'histoire de la theologie chretienne pourrait etre groupee selon
qu'une ou 1'autre tendance ou idee prevalente, et plus ou moins fixe,
a prevalu du moins a la surface et en apparence en le monde pensant
Chretien. A un moment, c'est le Jansenisme tout le monde est
janseniste ou est soupconne de 1'Stre. Puis c'est le quietisme. Plus
tard le liberalisme. Et enfin le modernisme. >Et puis je note combien
differents, au fond, restent les plus solides penseurs d'une mSme epoque,
meme s'ils se trouvent groupes ainsi sous au fond un sobriquet. Ce
a quoi je vise ici surtout, c'est que sous le terme de modernistes se
trouvaient groupes, aimes ou soupconnes ensemble des hommes qui
possedaient deux orientations fondamentales fort differentes, a vrai dire
irreconciliables. Cette difference ne s'est point montree des 1'abord ;

334 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

mais les epreuves de la vie, et la logique immanentes aux deux
positions, ont tire cette difference de plus en plus au clair. Et, pour
ma personne, c'est maintenant ce qui me louche, en tout ce groupe de
cuestions, le plus au vif.

La difference capitale et decisive m'apparait done maintenant etre
la difference entre la Religion congue comme phenomene purement intra-
humain, non evidentiel au dela des aspirations de la race humaine ; et la
Religion congue comme essentiellement evidentielle, metaphysique, Peffet en
nous de plus que nous de plus que n'importe quels faits et desirs purement
humains. Naturellement, meme une telle conviction metaphysique,
ontologique, peut, et doit, user d'une grande circonspection et des
methodes les plus ameliorees psychologiques et epistemologiques. Et
1'histoire de la Religion et des Religions retient tout son prix, tout son
interet, non seulement aussi ici, mais, au fond, settlement ici.

Or, Monsieur Loisy mon ami toujours tres cher je le dis avec
detresse et amertume d'ame a perdu je prie Dieu, seulement pour
un temps ce sens evidentiel, realiste, metaphysique ce sens de plus
que notre pensee, de plus que tout juste ce que nous experimentons en
la Religion. Et cela fait que, pour mon ame, je ne trouve plus de
nourriture en ses ecrits recents ; cela ne fait appel qu'a mon activite
d'erudit ce qui, comparee a 1'autre, est bien peu de chose. Les
travaux de Bonajuti, plus encore ceux de Minocchi, ont aussi pour moi ce
vide, et avec bien moins d' esprit que chez le toujours fin Loisy. Meme
George Tyrrell par vocation un mystique s'est laisse selon mon
instinct aller, depuis son Mediaevalism, a la poussiere et la fievre
. des rationalismes et des controverses bruyantes. J'ai du absolument
mettre cette note introductive ici elle me coute beaucoup parce
qu'autrement vous croiriez que mon affection pour Loisy et Tyrrell,
et mon admiration persistente pour tels de leurs livres plus anciens,
veulent dire que je suis avec eux en leurs immanentismes, etc., ce qui
n'est point du tout le cas.

Je me trouve force, en simple loyaute, d'aller, ou de rester, encore
plus a droite. J'admire encore beaucoup telles pages de mes (toujours
bien aimes) amis Maurice Blondel et Louis Laberthonniere ; mais }e
dois avouer que mon interet pleinement vivant est maintenant donne
aux penseurs a peu pres tous Allemands, Anglais et Italiens qui
sont en train de nous constituer une epistemologie critico-realiste. Ceci
et le probleme nature et surnature me lie intimement au Prof. Troeltsch
a Berlin et au Prof. Norman Kemp Smith a Edimbourg. Et, par un des
tours paradoxaux si nombreux de la vie, je me trouve, moi, catholique
convaincu, profondement aide a bien m'epanouir, precisement en ce
catholicisme de mon ame, par le lutherien Troeltsch et le calviniste
Kemp Smith, plus ou moins centre les catholiques Blondel et Laber-
thonniere.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 335

Done, pour les livres catholiques, publics depuis 1870, qui m'ont
nourri 1'ame et la nourrissent encore :

1. John Henry Newman : " A Letter addressed to His Grace

the Duke of Norfolk, on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's
Recent Expostulation." London, 1876. Postscript, 1876.
(Autorise de l'glise.) (Se trouve maintenant en le volume
Anglican Difficulties, Vol. II. Une ceuvre de genie.)

2. Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder : Catholic Controversy.

London, 1886 (?) (Un petit livre maintenant a son n^ me
edition, plein de retenue, de dignite, de finesse, de chaleur
noble et large.)

3. Life of Mother Henrietta Kerr. Edited by John Morris,

2 &ne ec j 1887. (Une tres habile biographic d'une grande
ame que j'ai bien connue.)

4. George Tyrrell : Nova et Peter a. 1895.

5. George Tyrrell : Hard Sayings. 1898.

6. George Tyrrell : External Religion. 1897.

(Voila les trois livres de T. que je crois admirables ; ils proviennent
d'une grande paix et alimentent une telle paix chez les autres.)

(Son Oil and Wine, 1907, contient deja certains immanentismes
que je n'aime pas. Son Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 1909, est
un melange de choses profondement chretiennes et catholiques et de
pages fievreuses et desorientees. )

7. Leslie Walker : The Problem of Reunion. London, 1921.

12s. 6d. net. (Sept Essais par un ancien nonconformiste
protestant, maintenant jesuite, qui sont pleins de bon sens,
de bonhomie, de belle reconnaissance de ce que valent les
protestants pointus et batailleurs. Une ceuvre classique en
sa maniere.)

8. God and the Supernatural. Edited by Father Cuthbert,

O.S.F.C. London, 1921. 15^. net. (Dix Essais par huit
membres catholiques de 1'universite d' Oxford, de valeur
fort differente, mais dont "The Idea of God " par D'Arcy,
et " The Atonement " par Cuthbert, sont admirables.)

9. Odilo Rottmanner, O.S.B. : Predigten and Ansprachen.

2 vols. Miinchen, 1893, 1902 ; et

10. Geistesfriichte aus der Klosterzelle. Miinchen, 1908. (Les

fruits doux et nourrissants d'une ame profonde et d'un large
esprit. L'on y apprend a etre homme.)

11. Leon Olle Laprune : De la Certitude morale. Paris, 1880.

12. Leon Olle Laprune : Le Prix de la Vie. 6 me ed., 1899.

13. Leon Olle Laprune : De la virilite intellectuelle. 1896.

(Je dois au fond beaucoup a ces bons livres.)

336 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

I3A. Maurice Blondel : U Action. (Surtout en les exemplaires
qui contiennent une quarantaine de pages de plus.) Paris,

14. Louis Laberthonniere : Essais de Philosophie religieuse. (Ici

surtout la touchante, vivante "Theorie de 1'Education.")
Paris, 1903.

15. Victor Delbos : Le Probleme moral dans la philosophie de

Spinoza et dans j'histoire du Spinozisme. Paris, 1893.
(Quel beau livre je ne m'en lasse point !)

1 6. Victor Delbos : La Philosophie pratique de Kant. Paris,

1905. (C'est bien un livre a etudier. Je me sens sur qu'il
merite d'etre place ici, sans que je 1'aie bien etreint.)

17. Alfred Loisy : Ufivangile et I'ligHse. 1902 ; et

1 8. Alfred Loisy : Autour d'un petit livre. 1903.

(Ces petits livres, si brillants, ont plutot aide ma tete que
mon ame. Cependant il en restera pas mal de choses.)

19. Alfred Loisy : U fivangile selon Saint Jean. 1903.

20. Alfred Loisy : Les fivangiles synoptiques. 1908.

(Les parties qui traitent des discours sont, pour la plupart,
d'une penetration magistrale. J'y ai beaucoup appris, mais
1'introduction aux deux volumes synoptiques, quoiqu'incroy-
ablement brillante, est, pour moi, bien moins solide que
n'est le corps de ces volumes. Et meme en ce corps, M.L.
commence deja a etre trop subtil, trop sur ofo il lui manque
a peu pres tous les materiaux pour une decision sobre. II
prelude deja a son tout recent gros volume, Les Actes des
Apotres, ou il sait, en un detail etonnant, ce qu'ont etc des
ecrits dont 1'existence meme n'est qu'une hypothese a lui.)

21. Antonio Fogazzaro : Piccolo Mondo Antico. Milano, 1895.

(De beaucoup ce que A. F. a fait de mieux; un vrai
classique, qui m'a beaucoup aide religieusement.)

22. Bernardino Varisco : I Massimi Problemi. Milano, 1910.

23. Bernardino Varisco : Conosci Te Stesso. Milano, 1912.

(Deux beaux livres d'une ame revenue a la foi en Dieu de
tres loin.)

24. Prof. Aliotta : The Idealist Reaction against Science.

London, 1912. (Une bonne traduction anglaise du texte
Italien, texte que je ne connais pas. Ce livre exprime avec
un grand eclat ce qui me dissatisfait de plus en plus en les
philosophies, ou meme en les methodes, d'immanence.)

25. Paterno Spirito : Pensieri (del Padre Pietro Gazzola). Roma,

Bestetti e Tummelli, 1918. (421 pensees de ce Barnabite,
une ame grande qui a eu beaucoup a souffrir, mais soutenue
jusqu'a sa fin du sens realiste, evidentiel de la religion, de
1'amour de sa pr^trise et du celibat volontaire trouve si

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 337

fructifiant, et enfin par un esprit qui, le moins de controverse
que Ton puisse penser, n'avait rien de sceptique, voire meme
rien de protestant. Un de mes bien chers amis.)

Et maintenant je note que le petit livre qui m'a le plus
aide a ete oublie, peut-etre parce que, lui surtout n'est qu'un
echo ecrit d'une voix, d'une vie, qui m'a directement forme.
26. Quelques directeurs d'ames. Souvenir de la crypte de Saint
Augustin. (Petites allocutions de 1' Abbe Huvelin, imprimees
d'apres les notes prises par ses auditeurs.) Paris, Gabalda,
1912. 3 Fr. 50. (L'on me dit que le volume est epuise,
et je cherche en vain de mettre la main sur mon exemplaire
fort use.)

Je finis ce rapport si long et si indigeste ce 16 juillet, devant main-
tenant me donner a mes autres besognes bien nombreuses. Je n'ajouterai
que deux remarques :

1 . Je vous envoie, par la meme poste, en cadeau modeste, la Catholic
Controversy de Ryder, croyant que, malgre son titre, ce petit livre
pourra beaucoup vous plaire.

2. Je dois vous dire que j'ai maintenant lu et savoure a 1'aise, mes
dimanches apres-midis, chaque mot du Volume I des Lettres intimes
de Gaston Frommel. Tres, tres rarement j'ai trouve telle phrase, tel
mot qui ne m'allait pas ; et fort, fort souvent j'ai trouve 1' expression la
plus noble pour mes pensees les plus intimes, ou, mieux encore, un
stimulant nouveau pour les pensees qui ne s'etaient guere encore formees
en moi. Quand avec le temps j'ai aussi fini le Vol. II, je vous en
ecrirai plus longuement. Bien de remerciments encore pour ce beau
cadeau.

Respectueusement a vous,

(BARON) F. VON HUGEL.

Je viens d'envoyer le MS de 1'index de mes Essays and Addresses
a Dent. II espere publier ce volume au mois de septembre. Je vous
1'enverrai.

To G. G.

July 21, 1921.

I have now lots to answer, lots to tell. But first about the books.
I am sending you three books about Socrates two are presents, one is
a loan ; and a fourth book as a help an adviser with regard to
sensitiveness.

I. I want you first to read John Burners analysis of the evidence
as to Socrates, and his estimate as to the influences which played upon
Socrates's mind and the way in which he sorted them out and developed

338 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

them. You will find this in Burnet's edition of Plato's Phaedo (which
I lend you), pages ix Ivi. I want you to study these pages twice through,
most carefully.

2. Then take (in the volume I give you of Xenophon's Anabasis
and Memorabilia] the Memorabilia of Socrates, pp. 349-507. This,
too, I want read through at least twice (with the notes, as far as you can
follow these ; and looking up all sites in your Classical Atlas). Please
keep alive everywhere to Socrates's irony ; he hardly ever opens his mouth
without it colouring what he says ; take him literally and you mostly
make him say the very opposite he means. Try, too, to trace the
influence of the Sophists, of Anaxagoras, of the Pythagoreans and
Orphics, etc. : Burnet ought to have helped you towards this. And,
finally, contrast his teachings and tone with the Christian outlook.

3. Then take the four Socratic Dialogues of Plato, translated by
Jowett, with Preface by Edward Caird, which I give you. First, a
double reading of Caird's Preface, pp. v-xi. Then the Analysis of the
Euthyphro, pp. 1-9. Then the Euthyphro itself, pp. 1036, twice.
The same with the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. Note again, in
these four Dialogues, Socrates's irony, the sources of his ideas, and their
limits and peculiarities when compared with Xenophon's account of
them, and, still more, when compared with the Christian outlook.
(Of course pre-existence is a myth, and theie do not really occur any
memories from such a pre-existence.)

When you have done all this, I should like you to re-read again
Burnet's account, and to see how far you yourself have found it true.
(You will remember that I utilised Burnet's elucidation of all that the
philosopher Socrates owed to the religions (Pythagorean and Orphic)
in my criticism of Corrance, and his turning from the Sun, definite
Religion, to the Moon, philosophy.)

4. I give you Faber's Spiritual Conferences because, although
I do not believe him to be a truly classical spiritual writer, several of
these conferences will at least can, I think help you much.- I am
thinking especially of " Kindness," 153 ; " Wounded Feelings,"
260-274 ; "The Monotony of Piety," 314-332 ; and "All Men
have a Special Vocation," 375396. Surely, Sweet, there is much,
much knowledge of our poor human heart here. I feel that Faber's
limitations are, at bottom, three, (i) He hardly ever leaves anything
to his hearers or readers to develop further by and for themselves. He
was cleverly called " the spiritual Dickens " by a man who pointed out
the same peculiarity in Dickens. (2) He has got a touch indeed more
than a touch of vulgarity he can, at times, speak as though he were
a Salvation Army Hallelujah lass. And (3) he never quite got beyond
the Anti-Protestantism so common amongst our converts devotion to
the Blessed Virgin, loyalty towards the Pope, and the like, were, because

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 339

antipathetic to Protestants, underlined by, revelled in by, Faber to a
degree which, at times, put them out of their Catholic proportion, their
Catholic perspective. He would thus, instead of a continuator of the
grand old P re-Reformation Catholic piety of England, become an
imitation an affectation of Italian, of Neapolitan piety. But you
will find only little of all this, in this volume, I think. Faber sprang
from an originally French Huguenot family ; hence, in part, I do not
doubt, his love of point, paradox, hyperbole. . . .

As to Confession, I have a certain complication about it in my mind,
which, I expect, is not very common even amongst my own people.
You see, with the Sacraments, as indeed with all other points of religion,
I so love to trace the great lines of their development, and to find out,
and to cling to, whatever may be of the essence of the Catholic doctrine
and practice. Applying this to Confession, I find (as you can read in
full in my Mystical Element] that the essential, primitive, unchange-
able part is obligatory Confession in case of Grave Sin. The Protestant
Reformers abolished the Obligation in any and every instance. And
now High Churchmen have come to recommend fairly frequent
Confession, in imitation of our (R.C.) late medieval, and still more,
our modern habit. Now I do not doubt that fairly frequent Confession
can help on souls, yet I love to keep quite clear in my own mind an ele-
ment of Obligation which the Protestant Reformers unhappily lost
abolished ; and an element of Conditionality Freedom with regard
to the late mediaeval and modern frequent Confession, which even
my High Anglican friends are lacking in. I want, in this point also,
a wise, firm circumspection. But to take the practice of Confession as
simply in all circumstances not obligatory as always what we call
" Confession of Devotion," I quite see that also, taken this way, the soul
can get real help and growth in self-knowledge, humility, etc., from it.
Since our, late centuries, discipline in the matter is just disciplinary i.e.
since Rome herself could relax it any way up to, excluding, Confession
for Grave Sin : it is certainly not for me to press you to very frequent
Confessions of Devotion. I myself go every fortnight or every three
weeks but this, simply because of the extant discipline of the Church,
and because I feel I ought not to exempt myself from it. Cela varie,
Huvelin would have said, entre dme et dme.

I have, these last days, been seeing a former fellow student of
Gertrud's, for many years an Agnostic, then a fervent High Anglican ;
who, now 38, is inclining to take herself back, to look out for No. i ,
to grumble and to turn sour. Am doing what I can for her : pray
for her. Have explained how she requires a second conversion this
time against the dust and drear when the physical enthusiasm dwindles.

340 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

To G. G.

Oct. 7, 1921.

You bring up, my Child, a point which I suppose you really feel an
objection. Even if you do not feel it so, I think it well worth while to
clear out this corner of your mind, so as to make quite sure that you
correctly seize the truly great doctrine of Purgatory. I want, then, to
make sure that you clearly understand that, according to that doctrine,
suffering (rightly accepted suffering) is indeed usually necessary for, is
inherent in, the Purification from sin, evil habits, etc. But it makes no
substantial distinction between such Purification as taking place already
here or taking place in the Beyond. In all our Retreats we are taught
that it will have been our own fault, if the sufferings of our life here have
not sufficed to purify us from our sins and evil habits. Of course, even
very great sufferings would not, simply of themselves, purify us from even
small evil habits. It is only suffering meekly accepted, willed, trans-
figured by love of God, of Christ it is only such, that will purify or cure
anything. This is so true that, where the love is perfect, this love alone,
without any suffering not directly prompted by itself, completely blots out
the evil dispositions. Such a soul, even if previously a great sinner, goes
straight to Heaven upon its death. Yet, in all cases, Purgatory applies
indifferently to suffering rightly borne in this life and the same similarly
borne in that life. There is simply no such thing, as a Purgatory here
followed, as though it had not been, by a Purgatory hereafter. On the
contrary, every pang God allows to reach us here, and which we manage
to bear a little well, does a work not to be repeated. We become thus
fitter and fitter for complete union with Christ and God from the very
minute of our death.

I have written " a little well " on purpose. For to suffer well is far
more difficult than to act well (although the ordinary talk is that we have
just " to grin and bear " suffering we can do nothing to it or with
it ! ! !). Holy suffering is the very crown of holy action. And God is
no pedant : He can and does look to the substance of our suffering, and
knows how to penetrate beyond our surface restlessness or murmurs.
Indeed, part of the great work suffering effects in the soul doubtless
springs from the way in which, when acute, it almost invariably
humbles us : we can much less easily cut a fine figure in our own
eyes over our sufferings, than we can over our actions when in peace
and plenty.

You understand all the above completely, I trust ? We will both do
what gently, peaceably we can to have all our Purgatory every drop of
it here ; and then, and then Heaven, the closest union, unfailing, with
Pure Joy, with All Purity, with Christ, with God.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 341

To Henri Garceau

Thursley : Sept. 7, 1921.

I am so glad to give you this really beautiful edition of the Greek
New Testament doubtless the greatest book, or rather collection
of writings, extant amongst mankind. I am now in my joth year,
and I have in no wise exhausted these writings for my outlook, my
strengthening, my practice, every day and hour. And of yourself
I can only expect that you should cultivate a sense of being, in your
earlier years especially, yet also throughout your life, thus always lagging
behind an adequate comprehension of these depths and heights.

To Mrs. Lillie

Sept. 21-23,

Two classes of letters run risks of never getting written those for
which there is too little material, and those for which there is too much.
You belong to the latter class for me ; I put it off and off because I do
not find the time in which to write about the crowd of things I want to
refer to ; and meanwhile this crowd keeps growing on and on. So
to-day I will force myself to start this scribble, and again will check
myself not to make it too long. In this way I can hope to finish it
to-day or to-morrow, without any serious set-back to my composition-
work which so ill brooks any rival writing, even tho' it be but simple
letters.

First, let me report shortly about An American Idyl, which I read
very carefully. I fully understand its fascination for you in the beautiful
unworldliness and devoted marital love of those two, kept so young by
this great love. And I share your admiration for the book's style so
exactly right for the subject and its temper and so strikingly fresh,
plastic, and natural. I quite see that the book deserves my careful
study, as a standard expression of a now prevalent temper and ideal ; and
I thank you much for making me know it. Its public spirit throughout
is most attractive. But I am bound to be sincere and to admit that
Carlton Parker impresses me far more as a character than as a thinker.
As a thinker he remains astonishingly crude to the last astonishingly
so, seeing that, after all, a man of forty is not or should not be a child.
He, at forty, writes and judges of philosophy and religion as a clever lad
of seventeen. It is pages in to 119, and pages 129 to 131, that I am
especially thinking of. They express a reaction, an excessive, quite
undiscriminating reaction, against a doubtless narrow and unwise religious

342 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

upbringing, a reaction quite understandable, say, at seventeen or
twenty ; but a reaction which, as kept still unbroken, without discrimina-
tion, without the slightest revision till forty, throws, for my feeling,
an unfavourable, indeed an unpleasant, light upon his capacity, or at
least upon his performances, as to any and all deep thinking. Wisdom
comes only from experience and not from the Book (p. 1 1 6). As
though one hundredth of his daring thinking I mean thinking which
would look timid beside his own restless flux of impressions would
not suffice to discover the Book to be a great collection of books books
of the most various moods and helps books, the literary precipitants of
all experience of the most precious of all experience of religion. His
untempered enthusiasm for Dewey and the behaviouristic philosophy and
pragmatic literature (pp. 116, 117, and elsewhere) : again how crude,
how impatient, how cock-sure it is ! This, whilst psychology and
especially the theory of knowledge were, at their best, getting away from
plunging ever so much deeper than these thin, superficial, glittering
thinkers ! And how utterly topsy-turvy is his finding a crowning
instance of what pragmatistic, all-things-in-flux, feeling and living pro-
duced in the past, in Giotto's picture of the Madonna and the enthusiastic
crowd which escorted it ! (P. 118.) As if that had not been based
both as to the painting arid the appreciation upon the deepest, a general
belief in the invisible, more than human, realities ; upon a stable,
resilient tradition ; upon not pragmatism, not behaviourism, not sheer
humanism ! I know quite well that the human element wants careful
inclusion, and I do not doubt that psychology can and will help greatly
in economic matters. I love him whenever he is truly positive, con-
structive, and in his less impatient moods. But really, as to religion
directly, he has astonishingly little to teach one, unless it be to warn one
against slap-dash renunciations !

Then there was the interesting convert and her vocation plans. My
Wife and I both liked her much, and we are greatly impressed with, and
delighted at, her evidently profound and entirely unstrained (natural),
supernatural happiness with those clearly austere Benedictinesses. It
shows that the American Benedictine priest who advised her to try such
an austere, field-working, and not a mitigated, literary form of Bene-
dictine life was admirably in the right. And what a fine proof, con-
clusive, I always feel, in its power and degree, of the genuineness of
the supernatural, is such a case as that of this no more girlish, cultivated,
strong-willed, entirely exceptionally sane woman, finding her happiness
in such a hard life, which derives all its sweetness from the spiritual, the
supernatural grace which prompts it ! I now firmly believe she will
persevere and be professed. And how fine if she can eventually return to
America, there to gather around her, and to test and train for a similar
life, such souls as she may find there ready for, and (probably unknow-
ingly) looking for such a life !

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 343

I have myself had, recently, occasion to defend, to try and explain,
such a life to the widow of an Anglican Bishop and a very distinguished
writer on mediaeval and renascence Catholic Church History. Her
niece has just become a postulant at ourThekla's Carmelite convent in

North Kensington. I found Mrs. quite sensible, indeed truly

sympathetic, toward our modern, active, directly philanthropic orders.
But, as many even High Anglicans still are, she continues dominated by
the severe warning the Protestant reformers addressed to the Almighty
(without that the Almighty paid much attention to them), that He may
not call any souls to a directly Contemplative and Adoring Life that
this would be necessarily idle, useless, displeasing to the Modern World
and hence (of course) to Him ! I told her I thought she could and would
become fully convinced of her niece's happiness (which, if she had a
vocation and remained in the convent, would be sure to be with her),
only if she could confine herself to quietly gathering and accepting the
impressions which this niece would then make for her, this without
insisting upon understanding why, how, she is, she can be, happy. Such
understanding would probably never become hers ; but she could become
sure of the happiness without such understanding.

Your daughters were so kind as to give me Lytton Strachey's Queen
Victoria. Do tell them, please, that I am now finishing my second,
most careful reading, marking and making notes both of and on passages
as I go along. The book is a veritable masterpiece as so much writing
the chief figures stand out with extraordinary vividness. Whether or
no he is quite just to the Queen, I do not yet feel sure of; nor can I
really like the man who wrote the book as he shows himself in the
writing of it, somehow. But I am very sure that this book, even as an
expression of a soul, is greatly superior to Eminent Victorians, which,
brilliant also, was marred through by cynicism and a determination to
ridicule and to render despicable one figure after another.

I have taken due note, and with genuine pleasure, of your two
references to the " Bollandists," as indicating your interest in them.
I find that I exaggerated when I wrote that Pere Delehaye had been
twice put upon the Index. He has not been put upon it at all. But
his Legendes Hagiographiques was officially forbidden for Seminary
Lecture purposes or even private study by seminarists, as not making
sufficient account of the supernatural element in Church History, an
element without which Church History becomes incomprehensible.
This, as a censure uttered during the Pontificate of Pius X, is relatively
slight. And indeed it is possible that Pere D.'s writings are rather
for mature men, for whom, after all, they are primarily intended. So
I continue to hope that you will care to help them, though I very
deliberately do not want you to help them, if you do not come to feel,
for your own self, that you like them and that they deeply deserve
such help. They are most masculine minds, fitted to aid other men.

344 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

My Essays ought to be already out ; but I have still heard nothing
as to details of binding, etc. ; so this, as so much else, is being delayed by
our post-war conditions. I want, when I have copies, to send the
volume inscribed to your husband as well as to yourself, since I somehow
thought of him not a little whilst writing the long preface to this
collection.

We have had an interesting reception into the Church, by Eric
Coleman, since he received yourself a daughter of the late Mr.
Meredith Townsend, joint editor with R. H. Hutton of the Spectator
during many years. I think Mr. M. T. was a Unitarian ; and she
herself has been a sort of Catholic mystic for many years. And now
she is a full, definite Catholic, I have no doubt, a deep and tender one.

With best wishes for all your doing and being, and thanks for your
letters, which I wish I could answer in all their subject-matter,

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

Let me strongly recommend your getting and studying : The
Problems of Reunion : discussed historically in seven essays by Leslie
T. Walker. London : Longmans, 1920. 255 pp. 125. 6d. net.

An uncommonly sane and sensible, genial, most instructive volume.

To a Lady

Oct. 29, 1921.

You evidently realised why and where I was hoping and praying
for a development in you. Such development did not at least directly
concern Rome at all. I quite realise how difficult (how dangerous,
unless they are definitely called) such a change to R. Catholic obedience
has become for many educated minds. And though I certainly should
love to see you simply and completely one of us ; and though, again,
I am certainly not going to be sure that you will never be given that
special call, I mean, that was not what, so far, made me wistful at the
thought of you. No : what I directly and clearly wanted for you was
just what you now tell me you have gained and you have won, D.G. !
I congratulate you and beg you to persevere, most faithfully, in all that
is positive in this your now, I pray, confirmed outlook. Of course, you
will have drynesses, disgusts, strong inclinations to revert to the more
or less " Pure " mysticism . . . but your visible Religion will safeguard
your Invisible Religion, and your Invisible Religion will give freshness
and variety to your visible Religion. Of course, the perfection of such
a combination remains an ideal for even the most advanced of us. Yet
it can be, and with yourself also will be, an ideal considerably and growingly
realised, to your profound profit.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 345

To the Same

Nov. 5, 1921.

/ fear as much for you the overdoing of Institutionalism, as the
ignoring or even flying from it ; indeed these two extremes are assuredly
twin sisters in such a soul as yours. What I do pray for, for you, is that
you should, in a time of peace and light, fix upon a certain minimum,
a nucleus, of Institutional practice, to which you will then adhere with
a patient perseverance, carefully not adding not much adding to it
when in consolation ; and not detracting not much detracting from
it when in desolation. And this minimum this nucleus should not
be fixed as for a naturally Institutional soul, or even as for an average
soul, but as for your soul, which, to the end, will find the Institutional
more or less difficult, but will none the less greatly require some, a little
of it, faithfully performed. I think of Church of some kind preferably
Holy Communion every Sunday ; at most that and, say, one week-
day Mass once a week at the Carmelites. Perhaps even these two
practices are too much for the minimum, since, of course, not the
resolution alone, but its execution, matters really ; and I should wish
to save you, above all things, from any real over-burthening.

To G. G.

Dec. 9, 1921.

I have indeed been silent a long time with, now, three dear and
interesting letters of yours to answer. The reasons of this have been
two. I have been a good deal tried by that arterial pressure at night ;
and as the doctor had told me that the less exertion there was in my
day, the less I should suffer from it at night, I determined to try what
cutting down everything at all avoidable would do. I am certainly now
free from that pressure, or, at least from those effects though, I suspect,
only for a little spell. Yet I am deeply thankful for it, since it means
capacity for my composition work. My second reason was that I was
trying to get you the Cure (FArs, and that stupid postal losses of
the first order have delayed my receiving the books till to-day. I now
send you, as presents, the Life of the Cure, two vols., and his Spirit,
in one little volume. (The Esprit repeats, in part, the sayings registered
in the Vie ; but adds many fresh sayings.) I wanted to send you
these volumes ready bound, but received them thus ; and I think it
better not first to get them bound, as you would then not have the books
till after Christmas. I have cut the books open for you, as I believe
myself to be expert at this. I trust and believe that the Cure's spirit
will sink into your heart, and help you greatly on to geniality, humility,
peace and happiness in God and for Him.

346 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

As to your questions :

As to the young ex-curate, now one of our people : how difficult,
indeed how impossible, it is to judge whether such extreme renunciation
is quite sound in and for that particular soul, and will help it on to deep
but quite balanced self-renunciation (as in Abbe Huvelin, the " Cure
d'Ars," etc.), or whether it is going to lead to dangerous reactions, etc.
The Christian life, at its deepest and highest, is certainly not mere, not
sheer common sense. And yet in the long run some common sense
has got to get into it unless it is to come to grief. There, too, one has
just simply to wait, and, meanwhile, not to treat such things as central
or as the measure of our advance or closeness to God.

As to whether converts to Rome are proselytisers. I think at first
as a rule they are. Surely, this is not difficult to understand. Such souls
have generally come, with considerable sacrifices, and, at the time with
much spiritual light and fervour, to see and feel sure of various facts
which they before saw fitfully or hardly at all. They very easily all
but inevitably forget or overlook the not inconsiderable lights or helps
they had before ; and they have not yet been long enough in the old
Church to have experienced its human poornesses, nor to have themselves,
within that Church, passed through desolation and reaction. My
brother told me of an interesting conversation he had with our Bishop
Brownlow, after the latter had been one of our priests and then a Bishop
some 48 years since he had been an Anglican High Church curate.
My brother told him how he sometimes felt himself to be possibly quite
wrong in not being more active and enterprising in trying to gain indi-
vidual Protestants in the Church. That, as a matter of fact, he did
nothing direct in this way he never took the first step. The Bishop
answered that, after the first few years of his R.C. life, when his zeal
was restless and, he had now long thought, indiscreet, he also had never
pressed anyone, had never taken the first step with anyone. That he
had now seen for many a long year how easy it is to disturb souls from
out of what contains much truth and which they can and do assimilate
to their spiritual profit, and to push and strain them up to something to
which they are not really called and of which they do not know what to
make. That his conscience did not upbraid him in these matters for
the many later years of his priestly and episcopal life ; and that, as to
those first years, he hoped he had not been as unwise as he might have
been.

Also, an experienced old priest (himself an early convert to the
R.C. Church) once told me that he had long found it a bad sign when
converts were not at least inclined to be active proselytisers. That with
born R.C.'s it was different : these could be thoroughly zealous in their
religion and yet not be thus active, or inclined to be thus active.

As to myself, I find myself inclined to be very zealous to help souls

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 347

to make the most of what they already have ; and, if they come to
think of moving, to test them to the uttermost. And again, to do all
I can to make the old Church as inhabitable intellectually as ever I can
not because the intellect is the most important thing in Religion it is
not ; but because the old Church already possesses in full the knowledge
and the aids to spirituality, whilst, for various reasons which would fill
a volume, it is much less strong as regards the needs, rights and duties
of the mental life. This my second zeal includes the ardent wish and
hope of serving sore and sulky, fallen off or falling off R.C.'s to heal
their wounds and bring them back. One fallen away R.C. gives me
more pain than a hundred accessions to the Church give me joy. For
it is the sticking it which really matters in these things and which is
difficult.

What you say about prayer, Sweet, is all very true, very solid.
I know well what you mean. But though we will most rightly shrink
from saying that this or that in it is God : yet it is God, His Reality,
His Distinctness from yet great Closeness to us, it is this grand Over-
againstness which through, and in, and on occasion of what you describe
we experience in our little degree. What comes last in our analysis of
such states, is first in real existence. I enclose for you a little article
which (as all except my big book) was spontaneously asked of me, title
- included. I send it because of the contrata bit ; and because I am
utterly sure that this is the. direct antidote to the all but universal
Pantheism of our times. Before people worry about the Church or
even about Christ, they must be helped to get God their notions as to
God sound and strong.

As to the Sadhu, I feel with you that we ought never to forget
his non-Europeanness. How strange that profound difference between
East and West ! Why, in some real way, the Sadhu, all Christian
though he be, is further away than are Plato and even Socrates ! The
Sadhu's visions are strangely wooden, leathery things, astonishingly other
than, and inferior to, the revelations or visions of Mother Julian or of
St. Teresa. It is in this matter especially that the object of the book
its object in the mind of S , not, I think, of Appasamy is not
attained : the object being to show that a man as entirely outside of any
Christian body or Church, can be as deep and delicate, as valuable a
mystic, as are the mystics belonging to the Church. S. really proves
the opposite of what he wants to prove.

As to Plato, I am delighted you are taking to him so strongly. I hope
you will end by being steeped in him j by having read all the Dialogues
we have fixed upon at least four times each ; and that you will come to
be able to compare Dialogue with Dialogue, and to use the Plato generally
for comparison and criticism in your non- Platonic reading. I am
trying to follow you in these your Plato readings : have so done the

348 VON HOGEL'S LETTERS

Protagoras and half of the Gorgias. So glad you are at the Phaedrus
and soon at the Symposium. And mind to admire the Meno I love it !

To a Lady

Dec. 26-29,

I should like a certain DEFINITE TIME GIVEN each day to DELIBERATE
PRAYER, which would not be much added to in times of consolation, nor
much detracted from in times of desolation. But such fixed time for
prayer as over and above your Church doings should not be long.
What you propose in your time-table will do very well indeed. Of
course, we are talking simply of deliberate prayer whatever kind and
degree of this suits you best i.e. most strengthens you to love, to work
and to suffer, and most humbles yet braces you. For as to the spirit of
prayer, inarticulate prayer, the prayerful disposition : this should more
and more penetrate all your waking hours. . . .

You tell me that you could not truthfully profess belief in certain
supposed Historical Facts. I suppose these to be the Virgin Birth, the
Bodily Resurrection, the Johannine Miracles, at least primarily. But
pray note that, even so, you can still retain the more general, and the
bed-rock principle of the Catholic mind. I should feel that you were not
clear as to your own deepest instincts or were being unfaithful to them,
if you could not, or did not, humbly set about full, definite development
of the principle I have in view. Now and then it shows in your acts,
temper of mind ; and then it disappears for a while, overlain by thoughts
or moods of another, a quite contrary, provenance. Let us work,
gently but wholeheartedly, at getting this principle to become one of the
chief beams in your spiritual edifice, part of the rock, known and willed
at all times, of your Faith.

There are, then, two possible positions with regard to Historical
Happenings (two positions, I mean, over and above the ordinary orthodox
position that the Church not only holds a list of Spiritual Truths, but
knows which of these Spiritual Truths is also a Factual Happening, and
that this its knowledge is infallible, unchanging, and binding upon all
men to the end of time. I am not asking this of you). You can hold
that Historical Happenings generally, that some Historical Happenings,
are necessary ; that belief in them is necessary, to every at all powerful
and perfect religion, hence especially so to Christianity. Or you can
hold that Historical Happenings even quite generally, that no Historical
Happening, that no belief in any Historical Happening, is ever an
essential part of religion ; that religion generally, and Christianity in
particular, can flourish will flourish, after every single supposed
Historical Fact has been demonstrated non-historical, and after all men
have come to recognise this complete defactualising of religion.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 349

Now I am very sure that the position which holds that some Historical
Happenings, that the non-refutedness of their historical character, and
that definite belief in this genuine Historicalness, are essential ingredients
of every powerful and at all perfect religion especially Christianity
is true. And I am quite sure that the opposite position the
reduction of religion to a system of mere ideas principles, etc. is
profoundly false. But when, then, I come to watch your mind and
soul, I find certain volcanic eruptions in favour of position No. I ; yet
also whole tracts of intervening, as it were slowly accumulated aqueous
formations, which really imply, or even spring from, position No. 2.
If you could, and would gradually, but most thoroughly, drop and
eliminate all the position No. 2, you would be left (even without
adding any one item to the list of Historical Happenings held by
yourself to be such) with an outlook possessing the fundamental
Catholic quality.

I note that you do not " at present understand in the least the
religious feeling of the need of a half-way house between one's self and
God." I note, too, that " the human-historical values " appear to you
as of secondary importance. Now here I cannot help feeling a serious
weakness and lacuna, indeed an inconsistency, in your psychology, your
analysis of the religious temper, and in your own, at least implied,
attitude on other occasions. As you probably know as well as I do,
all the finest recent psychology, indeed also the deepest epistemology,
show us, and insist upon, how we, poor human beings, at least in this
life, never begin (or in the long run keep up) the apprehension of things
spiritual except on occasion of the awakedness and stimulation of the
senses. That is, there is no such thing as an exclusively spiritual
awakening to, or apprehension of, spiritual Realities. This, to my
mind, is already decisive against all purely spiritual, entirely mystical,
quite non-historical, quite non-successive religion.

Next, religiously, the human soul, upon the whole, in the long run,
in its richest developments, certainly, I think, requires not a half-way
house for it on its way to God, but God Himself to come down to it, not
half-way but the whole way. To put it in the most homely way :
surely the infant does not feel its mother's breast a " half-way house,"
a queer artificial intermezzo between itself and its mother ; but the
infant feels that breast as the self-giving of that mother, as a self-com-
pression, a touching condescension for bringing the mother's own life to
the infant, and thus gradually to raise this infant to the mother's strength
and stature. St. Augustine surely, surely, had got this point right,
in spite of the great attractions which, quite certainly, a purely spiritual
religion possessed for wide stretches of his mind. He felt that it was
this condescension, this coming down to us of God, His appearing to us in
human form and ways, which " nourished love and ousted inflation."

350 VON HtFGEL'S LETTERS

Quite, quite right ! That alone, at least in some form and degree, will
ever give us a religion sufficiently lowly, homely, humbling. . . .

God does dwell in, and manifests Himself by, Historical Happenings
here, more than there ; now, more than then. But this spells grades
of Divine Self-Revelation. And, since in the higher and highest reaches
of spiritual reality the differences of degree issue more and more in
differences of kind, we reach at last an apex of spirituality which is, at
bottom, the deepest, fullest self-ihasement of God Jesus Christ, in the
Manger, on the Cross. . . .

P.S. I much like your love for your cats. I deeply love my little
dog ; and Abbe Huvelin was devoted to his cat. We all three can and
will become all the dearer to God for this our love of our little relations,
the smaller creatures of God. Again it was God incarnate, it was
Jesus of Nazareth, of Gethsemane, of Calvary, and not pure Theism,
that first taught this.

To Bernard Holland

Feb. Z7, 1922.

Forgive me, please, if I write as late and, I fear, only shortly. I am
none the less truly sorry for, yet, if I may say so, also truly proud of you.
What is the use of being a Catholic, if one tries to shirk, or tries to
suppress, such things at bottom, such grace offered, not only to one's
children but to one's own self? I well know how even otherwise
Christian indeed Catholic-minded Protestants, and even High Angli-
cans, fail one in such emergencies. Thus such a friend of many years
wrote to me recently, wondering why on earth I attached so much
importance to celibacy and voluntary renunciation that there existed
no texts in the N.T. to that effect. I asked him in answer, what
critic of any standing had ever doubted the authenticity of Our Lord's
declaration as to the voluntary eunuchs, and whether the celibacy of the
great Precursor, the greatest of the Followers, and of Our Lord Himself
was accidental ? The fact quite obviously is that Protestantism has
done much for the cultivation of the natural virtues, but has so long
fought shy of the heroic, supernatural acts and life, as to have pretty
well lost the simple sense of text upon text of the Gospels.

You will suffer much, poor man, but you will also grow ; there
is nothing like straight paying for one's religion to endear it to one.
I will especially think of and pray for you on Thursday. I have not
really lost Thekla, nor will you really lose Verena. Our daughters
will help us to Heaven our true home this without the slightest touch
of rhetoric. It is all terribly and yet delightfully real.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 351

To the Rev. Canon Newsom

March 29, 1922.

I take it that I owe to you that Newcastle paper with its interesting
account of Dr. Merz. I am truly sorry that he should have gone, and
it comes to me as a pang that, having been so kindly presented with his
Fragment through your mediation, .1 should never have reported
to him about it. Alas, three years, or something like that stretch of
time, ought surely to be sufficient for reading and digesting those three
hundred pages of his ; and yet my conscience itself does not really prick
me, for I have had much, much work for the brain which, after my own
compositions and direct readings for them, clamours for open air or for
quite light literature. And so it comes that my table is covered with
books, and fine books, kindly given me by men at home and abroad, and
very regretfully I do not succeed in reading them.

I take you to be, fortunately for yourself, intimate with all the
family. If so, will you kindly beg Mrs. Merz to accept my profound
respect and sympathy in this her and her family's great loss. I note,
among the details given in the obituary article, that there is a Miss
Teresa Merz, and this makes me hope that that name was deliberately
chosen, by the great dead man, from admiration for that great Spaniard
whom my youngest daughter looks to as the Foundress of the reformed
Order to which she herself so happily belongs.

I had hoped, in the vague way in which we hope for so many
unlikely good things, still to make acquaintance with Dr. Merz in
Newcastle. You will surely miss him greatly, and no one person ever
does really take the place of any other.

I am glad to think that Leslie Hunter is so soon to be one of the
Canons of your Cathedral. I have a true affection for his high and
earnest young life and mind, and I find his outlook so very wide, pene-
trating and rich. I loved his father before him, and yet I cannot but
feel that Leslie, while inheriting much of his father's noble character,
has somehow achieved a larger grasp of the varied facts and forces of
the life of Religion.

I trust that you and Mrs. Newsom and the children are all flourish-
ing, and that you sometimes remember

Your cordial old friend,

F. VON HUGEL.

To a Girl (on her Confirmation, Anglican)

April ii, 1922.

I know that you are to be confirmed to-morrow, and I feel an
inward pressure to write you a little letter on this important step in your

352 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

life. If you were engaged to be married, I would certainly write to
you ; so why should I not about an act, different indeed, but not
necessarily less important ?

Let me then go back in my mind to when I was your own age,
and try to get on to paper one predominant desire which then came
into my own inner life. You see, when I began to try to be good
to serve God I already, alas, found myself involved in gravely bad
habits and inclinations. But this, once I was, by God's grace, awakened
to long to be straight and true to go direct to God and Christ had
one great advantage. I saw young fellows all around me fretting to be
free, to be their own sole, full masters. They fretted against this and
that thing ; against this and that person. They thought if only they
could get away from these, they would indeed be free. But I myself
could not feel that to be nearly enough ; I was too little happy in myself
to fiddle-faddle at such little things ! I wanted, / had to, get rid of
not those outside conditions, not those other people and their orders,
etc. : but I had, somehow, to become free from self, from my poor,
shabby, bad, all-spoiling self \ There lay freedom, there lay happiness !
And I see now at 70, more clearly again than at _i 7, that I was right
there. That all external things, all persons, even if and when they may
be not to our natural liking, that they none can really hurt us, indeed,
that they all of them can readily help us, once we are awake, spiritually
awake ; and that our service of God really means for us the fighting of
self. Of course God's service includes also our service of others our
relations, our friends. And again, even the whole of religion is not
the whole of our activities and interests is rightly not the whole. Yet
it remains most true that our religion begins to be our romance our
most solid, sustaining romance only on the day on which it becomes
adult and quite real that is, only on the day on which we wake up to
self and determine to fight it.

Do not think, my dear, that I am comparing you with myself as
I was then. No, whatever may be your faults, you are a far better girl
than I was a boy. Not that I am thinking of any particular faults of
yours. I do not know you well enough to be able to do that. I am
only facing the two quite general, but quite sufficiently rousing facts :
that we all of us have " selves " (the enemies of our true, good selves)
to fight, and that only so fighting are we adult, fruitful and happy.

To Mrs. Lillie

April 20, 1922.

You know well, my dear Mrs. Lillie, by now, how deeply I care
for the scientific spirit, how much I admire it in Darwin and in your
fine husband, and how much I strive that my own work may be always

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 353

penetrated by it. You need then, I think, have no fear that I do not
understand your admiration for it ; I share it with you, as I think, to
the full. And yet it seems to me that, from sheer enthusiasm, you
become unconsciously unfair both to Science and to Religion. Unfair
to Science, because if Science and Religion really produce interchangeable
results, and you, notwithstanding, remain definitely religious, you will
have, after all, to ask the Scientists more than, as such, they give, indeed,
I am sure, more than, as such, they can give. For all Science, and in
the term I include history, psychology, etc., is essentially the ceaseless
seeking, the ceaseless restating, the ceaseless discovering of error, and
the substituting of something nearer to the truth. I do not see how
Science can be asked to start with a definite God, with a definite Future
Life, with anything like a Church ; I think it cannot even end with
anything more than a vague reverence and sense of a deep background
a very elementary Theism will, at best, and can hardly, be reached by it :
such Theism will be, I believe, its maximum. Now, Religion, on the
contrary, begins with a full affirmation of a Reality, of a Reality other
and more than all mankind. It is certain of God, certain of Christ,
certain of the Church. It is a gift from above downwards, not a groping
from below upwards. It is not like Science a coral-reef, it is more like
a golden shower from above. Assimilate Religion to Science, and you
have levelled down to something which, though excellent for Science,
has taken from Religion its entire force and good ; you have shorn
Samson of his locks with a vengeance. On the other hand, force
Science up to the level of Religion, or think that you have done so, and
Science affirms far more than, as such, it can affirm, and you, on your
part, are in a world of unreality. Let me illustrate this by the very
example you give me of the death of Metchnikoff. His final words
" Do not fear for me, I am not afraid ; I have had a Divine light :
Science will solve the problems, the wonderful problems of existence " :
I contrast with these Littre's last months with his sense of awe,
the feeling of whole new worlds coming upon him, worlds not of
scientific discovery at all, but the worlds of contrition, of a sense of sin,
of a sense of an immense over-againstness, of a huge Other before which
he felt crushed and a nothing. In the former case we have the courage,
the selflessness, the optimism, of a true scientist ; in the latter we have
the elementary religious instincts. The two things are quite uninter-
changeable : my dear Mrs. Lillie, pray look out to keep, or to gain,
the sense of this difference. May I, though it is a sacred memory to
me, just refer to the death of my eldest daughter in Rome ? She was no
scientist, but a Christian, and Catholic believer : she died loving God,
with a sense of God, with an abandonment of herself into God's Hands,
with a love of Christ as God with us, with a hope, with a trust, to be
eternally with Them. Now, of course, I do not quote this as anything

2 A

354 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

but what occurs again and again among definitely religious souls, I only
quote it to bring out, if I can, the difference, which very certainly is
there, between the state of soul of the scientist simply as such, and the
state of the definite religionist. Of course, the complete thing would
be to have both, and certainly both have occurred again and again in the
same soul. There was, for instance, Lord Rayleigh, a great mathe-
matician, a great physicist, who died not long ago, a devout High
Anglican who had never missed daily Church since his early manhood.

It was sitting by the side of Abbe Huvelin that I, more vividly than
ever before, realised the difference between these two levels, realised
their respective necessity, their respective liberty. A splendid Greek
scholar, as fine and free as is your Professor as a biologist, and with a
fear and horror of the interference of theologians, this sane man was
absorbed in the love and service of God, and of his neighbours for the
sake of God. For myself I must have both movements : the palace
of my soul must have somehow two lifts a lift which is always going
up from below, and a lift which is always going down from above. I
must both be seeking and be having. I must both move and repose.
But it is as well that I should stop now : the thing is not merely to see
these things but to practise them : to be is a very different affair.

With kindest regards from us all three, and with cordial respects to
the Professor,

Yours very sincerely,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Mrs. Lillie

May 5, 1922.

Upon attaining to-day the age of seventy, with its pensive scriptural
connotation, I have been reminded of you, the kind friend beyond the
ocean, in two ways which invite me to write this P.S. to that long letter
of mine.

One thing springs from your kind question as to how to procure
copies of my Mystical Element. That will, I believe, be now pretty
soon quite easy, since a Mr. Algar Thorold has now definitely under-
taken to see a new edition, practically a reprint, through the press, so
that I hope the thing will again be on sale, say by next Easter at latest.

The other thing has been vividly brought to my mind by my present
renewed reading of my late friend, Mgr. Duchesne's wonderful letters
to me. I am busy getting ready a little letter to the Times Literary
Supplement about this great Early Christian scholar. The point is the
steady support Duchesne got, amidst many difficulties, in the Bollandists.
And this reminds me of your invitation to me to suggest some work for
you to help, and my answering by proposing the Bollandists. Of course

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 355

you are absolutely free in the matter ; I only want to make sure that '
in the midst of your wide and multiform activities you are not forgetting
these noble scholars and their work and influence. There is science, as \
true and as noble as is that of the Natural Scientists ; all the various 1
knowledges ever more carefully pursued are wanted.
With renewed warm messages to you all,

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Miss Maude Petre

June 8, 1922.

I have now at last not only read your "Still at It" 1 twice over in
different moods and circumstances, but I have also very carefully thought
over all the main points of your paper. I can well understand that you
feel it to be quite a landmark in your own thinking about these most
important points, which have been painfully costly to both of us in every
sort of way. All through I am struck with the freshness and the vigour
of the writing. This is apparent from the first, in the gracefully
humorous, earnest, and sad little introduction. Then I find your little
sketches of what the chief currents of Modernists in the Church
attempted or carried out, very clear and very accurate. I feel sure that
you are quite right in thinking the controversies with regard to Christ
to have been by far the most important and difficult. Also I feel
entirely with you that Christ and Church go together.

Where I am not able to follow, and, indeed, where I am somewhat
puzzled in finding you so transparently confident of uttering simply
undeniable truths, is on the following three or four points. I believe
that one and all indicate what is, to my mind, an insufficient trust in the
carrying power of human reason at its best in human reason which is,
after all, the gift of God.

i. You say (p. 405) : " We have to take count not only of what has 1
been ascertained, but of what at any future date may be ascertained. /
So that for the believer it is quite useless to establish a satisfactory refuge
from criticism so far as it has reached, when he knows that it may, even
if it do not eventually, reach much further still." And the next little
paragraph carries on this same point.

Well, I do not think this is anything like as true as it is plausible.
Let us take Geology, which I studied in my later teens under Pengelly.
I have taken up with it again fifty years later, in the now predominant
manuals, and what have I found ? Two things, and not only one.
I have indeed found a quite extraordinary enrichment. For instance,
the cretaceous period is now something containing groups within groups
and interrelated details, which were quite beyond the ken of my text-
1 Hibbert Journal, April, 1922.

356 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

; books in the sixties of last century. But, and this is the most striking
part of the whole affair, the general orientation, the large outlines, the
predominant facts, remain what and where they were. Take again
Egyptology, about which assuredly I know little enough. Still, I hap-
pened a short while ago to have to read up, in the best new introductions,
about the discovery and the present-day study of hieroglyphics, and could
compare this now new account with what I learnt as a boy. What had
happened ? Well, something strictly parallel to what has happened in
Geology. The fact is, surely, that all the departments of human know-
ledge pass through something that can be illustrated by the setting of a
jelly. The jelly at first is simply fluid ; it is next capable of collapse,
or of utter change of form, at any moment ; but it becomes more and
more coherent and solid, till at last it stands there, a definite and fairly
solid shape.

Everything points to show that the same has happened, and will
happen, to Biblical criticism. Certainly I have myself noticed in the
Old Testament, of which the criticism is so much older, how stable and
persistent is its general orientation, how more and more of detail are
the questions which still arise. And I do not see why this principle,
so universal in all the sciences, should turn out not to be operative in
New Testament criticism also.

2. I have been struck with, here and there, a curious antithesis,
which I admit is very dear to Kant, though not, I think, to Kant at
his best. You say that " there is no religious conception which has not
a human taint ; we make God even in the act of worshipping Him " ;
and you add that the Christ of the critic who remains a Christian
worshipper the Christ eternal, the mystical Christ " is an idol in so far
as the conception is a creation of the critic's mind " (pp. 408, 409). Now
it is, of course, true that in so far as these, and indeed any other con-
ceptions, are purely, are merely, the creation of a critic's mind, they are
idols, i.e. they are not what the realities aimed at are simply in them-
selves. But this, if a truth, is surely a truism ; it is indeed a tautology.
It does not follow, surely, that a conception which is the discovery, the

.-^creation (if you like to call it so) of the critic's mind, is necessarily utterly

\ different from the reality aimed at or envisaged. I do not pretend to

I understand Einstein's doctrine of Relativity, but it may be true, even

\ though we had to wait for Einstein to bring home the fact, if it is a fact,

to us. It is very clear now (precisely, I think, to the more vigorous and

independent of the thinkers coming on) that Kant was simply obsessed

by a mistaken presumption when he argued that the mere fact of my

having, or attaining to, a conception of anything renders absurd the

notion that this conception bears any likeness to the thing conceived.

3. You say that " so long as we find and feel the highest teaching of
spiritual reality in the Church we accept her doctrine, her discipline,

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 357

her objects of worship, but we accept nothing with the absolutism of
finality, because we know that it is only given us to see through a glass
darkly" (p. 409). Now here I wonder whether such abstention from
a quite final self-commitment could and ought ever to be accepted by
the Church ; and, if not, you seem to be taking back with one hand
what you give with the other. And is it really true that, in the greatest
habits of mind and the highest levels of scientific search for certainty
and of certainty in search, there really is such an abstention from a
wholehearted finality ? I think not. It seems to me, on the contrary,
that, in such deepest and highest scientific attitudes, there is an entire
certainty, only that this certainty assuredly does not cover all the details,
all the analyses, all the theories, within the object thus believed in. __
Copernicus and Galileo were quite, quite certain of the reality of the '
stars and planets, of their real inter-connection, their real mutual ;
influences, and that laws of movement were at work before them. Was
it not really this belief and its perfect finality which gave to their life
and work its steadiness, serenity and sublimity ?

4. You insist much upon our being of necessity pagans, that is,
of our having idols and requiring to have them. I wonder whether
this, brave and brilliant though it be, is not an over-statement ? For
I cannot, in thinking it over, find other than two great principles and
facts, which, neither of them, somehow, spell for me what you say.
There is the sacramental principle, the waking up of spirit under the
stimulus of sense, and this comes, I take it, simply from our soul-and-body
compoundness. And then there is the principle of the community, of
sharing our religion, and of getting it deep and tender by sharing it, with
every kind of educated, semi-educated, and uneducated fellow-believer.
This latter need and life very certainly involve endless patience with, and
indeed sympathy with, the sacramental principle applied as far as ever it
will go ; but I do not see how even here, we can or ought to encourage
ourselves to hold for ourselves what we recognise to be objectively
really idolatrous.

But let me please finish up on a further point among those which I
love to find so vigorously alive in your pages. I mean, where you declare
that " doctrinal development cannot be carried out in obedience to
history and science alone ; it must respond to religious needs also "
(p. 407) ; and this same most sound principle you insist upon again in
your last sentence on page 410.

Thank you then, once more, for all you have suggested to me and
taught me.

On Saturday night a great new outlook for my labours appeared,
fully formed, before me. My most kind friend, Professor Kemp Smith
of Edinburgh, has been (had been, I knew) working devotedly to secure
me a Gifford Lectureship at Edinburgh, and, behold, the formal invitation

358 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

has now come from the Senatus of Edinburgh University. True, the
two years of office cannot be before 192425 and 192526, since
Dr. Pringle-Pattison and M. Bergson have each to deliver their second
year's courses before me. But still I can hope to live and to be fit for
the four years involved in the undertaking, and I have gratefully accepted.
It means twice ten Lectures, so that really, at last, I ought to have space
in which to be clear ! My new book is to be held up, and worked out
as these twenty Lectures, and I hope to live to see it out after the said
Lectures are all over.

Yours affectionately,

F. VON HUGEL.

P.S. On reading over I see that I have left out a further point
which perplexes me what you say about the uniqueness of Christ ;
and a point which indeed I love with you most deeply that " in every
religion that speaks to the heart of man there must be some element of
Divine Revelation " (p. 409). But I must not be endless.

To Miss Hodgson

June 29, 1922.

I am most glad to possess the copy of your English Mystics you
so kindly promised me. What an admirable range of knowledge you
show, a knowledge so alive and penetrating, and this not only of your
direct subject-matter, but of such a mass of French, Spanish, and Greek
mysticism, and then, again, of points of psychology and philosophy more
or less connected with your subject. I have only been able so far to
browse in the book here and there, to read your most kind quotations
from myself, and to note, in the Index, the books and persons you have
specially considered.

I have been able to note with pleasure your well-phrased protest
against Dom Louismet's exclusion of Plotinus from the choir of great
Mystics. Abbot Butler in his Western Mysticism, soon to come
out, will, he tells me, give the exact words in which St. Augustine
treats the Ecstasies of Plotinus as genuine and from God. I think we
ought to work this testimony particularly, since never was there a man
less liable to any washy liberalism than St. Augustine, and since he had
here to do with a Pagan.

To Canon Lacey

Thursley, Sept. 12, 1922.

My dear Canon, Thank you so much for inviting me to speak at
your coming Convention on Prayer, Oral and Mental, also for asking
me to be your guest at that time. I feel it fully, as indeed it is, a solid

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 359

honour and a true kindness. But, after three days' reflexion, I see that
I cannot, alas, accept.

The quite decisive obstacle is my present and long future combina-
tion of extra small health and extra big work. Last June I was
nominated Gifford Lecturer in Edinburgh for 192425 and 192526.
I accepted, though well aware that I was then turned seventy and that
I may well be, if not gone, at least below the requisites of strength, two
and a half and three and a half years hence. And then a nervous break-
down occurred, which I have been trying to mend by a two months'
stay and do-nothing in this lovely place. I return home on Sept. 21,
and intend, a week later, to attempt the continuation of my new big
book becoming now the Gifford Lectures.

But I am quite clear that I must not, till at least a year hence, accept
any speaking, except at our L.S.S.R. The dictation work twice a week,
with preparation for, and correction and expansion of it, has, I believe,
a good chance of success if I thus spare my powers.

I must admit that a second difficulty would have presented itself,
had health permitted me to accept. I could not ask such a convention
to make an exception for me as to speaking in one of your Parish Churches.
Yet how could I expect my people to understand if I did speak there ?
I should, by so doing, go against two instinctive principles and practices,
grown stiff and stark since how many centuries that no Catholic
layman is to speak in a Catholic Church ; and no Catholic, be he
layman or priest, is to speak in a non-Catholic (non-R.C.) Church.
I know that Fr. Bede Jarrett has been speaking in some Nonconformist
Chapel 5 but then Fr. B. J. has never ranked as a Modernist, and
Nonconformist Chapels are felt by my people more as Lecture Halls
than as Churches.

Yours v. sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Professor Clement Webb

Sept. 28, 1922.

I am so sorry to be so late, and now so short, in answering your most
kind letter. Indeed you and your fine Wife are amongst the very best
friends I have now in all the world ; and, if and when I do come to
Oxford, I shall look forward to coming to stay with you, as you so warmly
offer. But two things will now keep me more than ever at home-
one of these you evidently have not heard. On June 1st the Senatus
of Edinburgh University unanimously invited me to be their Gifford
Lecturer for 1924-25 and 1925-26. I accepted, of course, whilst
knowing that I might easily not live till then, and, perhaps still more
probably, that I might, by then especially, not have the forces necessary

360 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

for these many weekly addresses in two successive years. But the
encouragement to my new book (which, of course, would alone form
my lectures) was and is great. But then my health, soon after, grew
depressingly small, and I got away to Thursley (Surrey) for 2 months,
getting home a week ago, better but still having to avoid fatigue which
dogs my footsteps in a trying way. All my strength has to go to my
work, which I hope to restart next week.

I have, at last, begun a careful reading of your Giffords ist Series.
You will help me greatly as an excellent example of the form such things
ought to have. And your method taking God before Man interests
me greatly. I believe you are quite right more, I hope, later on.
But such readings have now to be very restricted, alas !

As to Troeltsch, all that is quite finally settled, is that he will be in
England from March 7 to March 21 ; that this house will be his head-
quarters ; that he speaks to our L.S.S.R. on March 20 ; and that he
delivers three Addresses to the Advanced Theological Students of London
University precise dates not yet fixed, I think. He will speak to these
students in German, with (perhaps) a Syllabus in English. Before our
Religion Society, he will probably read out an English translation of
his Paper. He tells me that he knows his English accent to be bad.
I shall, of course, be very glad if you can organise some one meeting
with some kind of Address by him in Oxford. And the sooner I can
know that this is certain of fulfilment I will let him know. I have
had, for and with him, two failures and humiliations, and really that is
enough for so noble a soul and so astonishingly rich a mind, . . .

So, my kind Friend, if you find it possible to have T. to some meeting
in Oxford, well and good. If not, T. will not be brought by me to
Oxford, just as I have decided for him as to Cambridge.

I would then ask, say, half a dozen Oxford scholars to come and
meet T. here, just as I intend to do with Cambridge authorities.
Kindest regards to you both,

From your old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Mrs. Lillie

Nov. 29, 1922.

Thank you much for your fine long last letter. I think I had better
try to answer it at once.

I am so glad that you should go on being so happy, now two years
from the time when you took the big step at the Carmelites here ; and
your happiness has got nothing hectic or alarming about it : one feels
that you are morally certain to continue to the end.

As to my Mystical Element, I am glad to be able to say that

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 361

Mr. Dent has started now, or is going to one of these days, the setting
up in type of the new edition, and that he hopes to have it out by Whit-
suntide. The book will be a simple reprint, of course with all clear
errors corrected, of the original edition, except that he lets me print a new
Preface of sixteen pages before the old one, which will bring up the chief
objections raised to the book and such answers as I will have to them.
It will also then give short accounts of the chief books which have
appeared on the subjects treated by me since it first came out.

I am very happy in being able to be systematically busy over my
new book, pouring out twice a week to my shorthand secretary what
has been stored up in my head for quite a number of years. When this
will be finished, I do not know ; but I do know that the Gifford
Lectureship has all come to an end, for I had, in decency of conscience,
to let the Committee and Senatus at Edinburgh know that I felt sure
that I could never, two or three years hence, have sufficient physical
strength to lecture there in two successive years, giving ten lectures each
year ; the book I did not despair of, and I hoped to be able to get to
Edinburgh when it was all done for some new addresses upon it. The
Committee has been most kind, but could not see their way to letting
me simply furnish the book and a small indeterminate number of
Addresses upon it. All this, however, is not yet public, and will not be
until the Senatus on December yth accepts the recommendations of the
Committee, which I have no doubt they will do. After all, the whole
thing has been nothing but kindness from beginning to end, and
I remain cheered by the fact that I was selected for what is certainly
the finest Lectureship on these great subjects in the world.

How very charming and cheering is your account of your Uncle,
younger than ever in mind at seventy-four, and reading evidently the
very finest books. He reminds me of Dr. James Martineau at ninety-
two, who, when Wilfrid Ward invited him to join the Synthetic Society,
answered that he gladly did so since he had been unable to grow old /
without developing an ardent desire to learn.

I am so glad that he has read that fine book, Gairdner's Lollardism.
He will be interested to know how, about thirty years ago, when I lived
up at Hampstead, Gairdner was consulted by letter as to the value of
the books on the Protestant Reformation which stood then on the shelves
of an old-fashioned, predominantly Unitarian Library, which I had to
do with for its enlargement and improvement. James Gairdner wrote
that all that section of the Library was simply worthless and had become
waste paper, for that, during the last thirty years, the whole outlook
amongst scholars of competence as to that period had undergone a
profound change. Thus, for instance, we had Burnet's History of
the Protestant Reformation but that what we required was this book
as edited by N. Pocock, in seven volumes, " in which some few of the

362 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

thousands of lies contained in the original are refuted." Why should
not your Uncle read this noble work ? It is published by the Clarendon
Press, Oxford, and costs, or used to, I pound los.

But let me besides recommend to you both the three following books.
First, Liturgica Historica, by Edmund Bishop (Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 30.?. net). I knew Mr. Bishop well, a great scholar, one of
Lord Acton's disciples, whose only faults, in my mind, were those of
his master. He had a persistent irritation against Philosophy, or what
he took to be such ; and again, his suspicion and antipathy towards the
Vatican were, as I know well, from far greater personal experience than
ever had Bishop, distinctly excessive. But neither of these points appears,
I think, in his great book, which, though simply a collection of detached
pieces, is really golden.

Then there has just appeared Western Mysticism, by Dom
Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B. (London, Constable, i8j. net). This is a
thoroughly schokrly book, by a late Abbot, also my friend, himself
trained by Bishop. The book develops carefully the main facts and
convictions in the Mysticism of St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great,
and St. Bernard ; and attempts to show how sober and almost universally
practicable is what they teach. He does not as directly emphasize what
he does not want, the Mysticism which is, to his mind, over-penetrated
by Dionysius the Areopagite, those strange writings which we now know
very well to be not older than about 490 A.D., and which only gained
their full hold upon Mystical writers after the Crusades had brought to
Europe similar productions from the East. I have not yet read the
book, but I shall be surprised if I do not find it a little too sensible, but
we shall see.

And lastly, there is a charming book, delightfully cheap in these
miserable days of heavy-priced books ; the work is in two volumes,
little ones, at 3*. 6d. each (London, Washbourne). They are
respectively, The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, and The
Spiritual Writings of Dame Gertrude More. She was a grand-
daughter of Sir Thomas More, and was a delightfully large, simple,
richly religious soul. She died quite young, and has been little known
outside her Benedictine Order till this new edition, composed in part of
never printed material, appeared three or four years ago.

None of these books is " convert literature." I quite agree with
Uncle and Niece that that is, upon the whole, very poor stuff. I have
long ago got beyond it, or, at least, away from it, if ever I liked it at all,
which I rather doubt. Still, even here we should go somewhat warily,
for St. Paul's Epistles are great, are they not, and surely that is a convert
through and through ! Again, St. Augustine's Confessions are
immortal, and there again is a mind which to the last retained much of
the temper of the convert.

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 363

As to Tract Ninety, in particular, it is certainly a wonderful piece
of special pleading, and Newman himself lived to think so. Still it is
true that all such legal documents, where the question of submission to
them is raised, do not deserve more and other allegiance than what they
objectively declare or imply and apart from the motives of the framers
of such documents. And Ideal Ward used to say, with one of his big
laughs, that those reforming fellows richly deserve to have anyone escape
from their clutches if, in simple decency, he could manage it.

I am interested to find that you like so much those little books of
Father Roche's. He was, you know, at one time a close friend of
Father TyrrelFs. His is a fine, delicate mind, and his books bear the
impress of it.

Mr. Thorold I, of course, know well ; he has been most kind and
useful about this new edition of my big book, and will accordingly be
warmly thanked in my new Preface. He is seeing the book through
the press as its chief proof-reader. But, though I cannot help feeling
flattered at this kind thought of coming over to you and lecturing on my
Philosophy, I found myself compelled not to accept the generous offer.
The facts are that I felt, simply for myself, that to accept being lectured
on in one's lifetime is hardly modest ; and then again, I have never
written for the public at large, and I am most anxious that nothing I
ever write should be pushed. Let these poor things go down and take
root and produce fruit, if and where and when the God Who is so kind
to the birds and to the plants cares to bless them to this degree.

As to Mr. Thorold's Edinburgh Review article upon me, I feel that
I am hardly the person to say anything about it ; but I see two things
plainly enough : one big thing, that he has done his work very carefully
and most generously ; and the other is that on one point he has, probably
quite through my fault, mistaken what I mean. He writes as though
I held that all souls of all men in all times and places, except through
their own fault, are possessed of a genuine sense of God as such. Now,
mysterious though it be that the facts prevent my holding it, yet the
facts as I know them most certainly do. I have nowhere, as far as I
know, articulated such a doctrine, and certainly, for the last thirty years
at least, it has never been part and parcel of my mind. What I do hold
is something very distinct from this. I have the general principle in
my head that we are influenced by realities of all kinds, however finite
and fleeting, in all sorts of manners and ways, quite apart from our
consciousness of these influences, and still more, far more, than our
right articulation and interpretation of these our experiences : and this
principle I apply also and in a sense above all other realities to God.
Although I do not think that all men are clearly aware of His Presence,
and although still fewer are capable of articulating this dim consciousness
directly, yet these same men may very well present to the observer, who

360 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

for these many weekly addresses in two successive years. But the
encouragement to my new book (which, of course, would alone form
my lectures) was and is great. But then my health, soon after, grew
depressingly small, and I got away to Thursley (Surrey) for 2 months,
getting home a week ago, better but still having to avoid fatigue which
dogs my footsteps in a trying way. All my strength has to go to my
work, which I hope to restart next week.

I have, at last, begun a careful reading of your Giffords ist Series.
You will help me greatly as an excellent example of the form such things
ought to have. And your method taking God before Man interests
me greatly. I believe you are quite right more, I hope, later on.
But such readings have now to be very restricted, alas !

As to Troeltsch, all that is quite finally settled, is that he will be in
England from March 7 to March 21 ; that this house will be his head-
quarters ; that he speaks to our L.S.S.R. on March 20 ; and that he
delivers three Addresses to the Advanced Theological Students of London
University precise dates not yet fixed, I think. He will speak to these
students in German, with (perhaps) a Syllabus in English. Before our
Religion Society, he will probably read out an English translation of
his Paper. He tells me that he knows his English accent to be bad.
I shall, of course, be very glad if you can organise some one meeting
with some kind of Address by him in Oxford. And the sooner I can
know that this is certain of fulfilment I will let him know. I have
had, for and with him, two failures and humiliations, and really that is
enough for so noble a soul and so astonishingly rich a mind. . . .

So, my kind Friend, if you find it possible to have T. to some meeting
in Oxford, well and good. If not, T. will not be brought by me to
Oxford, just as I have decided for him as to Cambridge.

I would then ask, say, half a dozen Oxford scholars to come and
meet T. here, just as I intend to do with Cambridge authorities.
Kindest regards to you both,

From your old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

To Mrs. Little

Nov. 29, 1922.

Thank you much for your fine long last letter. I think I had better
try to answer it at once.

I am so glad that you should go on being so happy, now two years
from the time when you took the big step at the Carmelites here ; and
your happiness has got nothing hectic or alarming about it : one feels
that you are morally certain to continue to the end.

As to my Mystical Element^ I am glad to be able to say that

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 361

Mr. Dent has started now, or is going to one of these days, the setting
up in type of the new edition, and that he hopes to have it out by Whit-
suntide. The book will be a simple reprint, of course with all clear
errors corrected, of the original edition, except that he lets me print a new
Preface of sixteen pages before the old one, which will bring up the chief
objections raised to the book and such answers as I will have to them.
It will also then give short accounts of the chief books which have
appeared on the subjects treated by me since it first came out.

I am very happy in being able to be systematically busy over my
new book, pouring out twice a week to my shorthand secretary what
has been stored up in my head for quite a number of years. When this
will be finished, I do not know ; but I do know that the Gifford
Lectureship has all come to an end, for I had, in decency of conscience,
to let the Committee and Senatus at Edinburgh know that I felt sure
that I could never, two or three years hence, have sufficient physical
strength to lecture there in two successive years, giving ten lectures each
year ; the book I did not despair of, and I hoped to be able to get to
Edinburgh when it was all done for some new addresses upon it. The
Committee has been most kind, but could not see their way to letting
me simply furnish the book and a small indeterminate number of
Addresses upon it. All this, however, is not yet public, and will not be
until the Senatus on December yth accepts the recommendations of the
Committee, which I have no doubt they will do. After all, the whole
thing has been nothing but kindness from beginning to end, and
I remain cheered by the fact that I was selected for what is certainly
the finest Lectureship on these great subjects in the world.

How very charming and cheering is your account of your Uncle,
younger than ever in mind at seventy-four, and reading evidently the
very finest books. He reminds me of Dr. James Martineau at ninety-
two, who, when Wilfrid Ward invited him to join the Synthetic Society,
answered that he gladly did so since he had been unable to grow old^;
without developing an ardent desire to learn.

I am so glad that he has read that fine book, Gairdner's Lollardism.
He will be interested to know how, about thirty years ago, when I lived
up at Hampstead, Gairdner was consulted by letter as to the value of
the books on the Protestant Reformation which stood then on the shelves
of an old-fashioned, predominantly Unitarian Library, which I had to
do with for its enlargement and improvement. James Gairdner wrote
that all that section of the Library was simply worthless and had become
waste paper, for that, during the last thirty years, the whole outlook
amongst scholars of competence as to that period had undergone a
profound change. Thus, for instance, we had Burnet's History of
the Protestant Reformation^ but that what we required was this book
as edited by N. Pocock, in seven volumes, " in which some few of the

362 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

thousands of lies contained in the original are refuted." Why should
not your Uncle read this noble work ? It is published by the Clarendon
Press, Oxford, and costs, or used to, I pound los.

But let me besides recommend to you both the three following books.
First, Liturgica Histories, by Edmund Bishop (Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 30.?. net). I knew Mr. Bishop well, a great schokr, one of
Lord Acton's disciples, whose only faults, in my mind, were those of
his master. He had a persistent irritation against Philosophy, or what
he took to be such ; and again, his suspicion and antipathy towards the
Vatican were, as I know well, from far greater personal experience than
ever had Bishop, distinctly excessive. But neither of these points appears,
I think, in his great book, which, though simply a collection of detached
pieces, is really golden.

Then there has just appeared Western Mysticism, by Dom
Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B. (London, Constable, iSs. net). This is a
thoroughly scholarly book, by a late Abbot, also my friend, himself
trained by Bishop. The book develops carefully the main facts and
convictions in the Mysticism of St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great,
and St. Bernard ; and attempts to show how sober and almost universally
practicable is what they teach. He does not as directly emphasize what
he does not want, the Mysticism which is, to his mind, over-penetrated
by Dionysius the Areopagite, those strange writings which we now know
very well to be not older than about 490 A.D., and which only gained
their full hold upon Mystical writers after the Crusades had brought to
Europe similar productions from the East. I have not yet read the
book, but I shall be surprised if I do not find it a little too sensible, but
we shall see.

And lastly, there is a charming book, delightfully cheap in these
miserable days of heavy-priced books ; the work is in two volumes,
little ones, at 35. >d. each (London, Washbourne). They are
respectively, The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, and The
Spiritual Writings of Dame Gertrude More. She was a grand-
daughter of Sir Thomas More, and was a delightfully large, simple,
richly religious soul. She died quite young, and has been little known
outside her Benedictine Order till this new edition, composed in part of
never printed material, appeared three or four years ago.

None of these books is " convert literature." I quite agree with
Uncle and Niece that that is, upon the whole, very poor stuff. I have
long ago got beyond it, or, at least, away from it, if ever I liked it at all,
which I rather doubt. Still, even here we should go somewhat warily,
for St. Paul's Epistles are great, are they not, and surely that is a convert
through and through ! Again, St. Augustine's Confessions are
immortal, and there again is a mind which to the last retained much of
the temper of the convert.

VON HtfGEL'S LETTERS 363

As to Tract Ninety, in particular, it is certainly a wonderful piece
of special pleading, and Newman himself lived to think so. Still it is
true that all such legal documents, where the question of submission to
them is raised, do not deserve more and other allegiance than what they
objectively declare or imply and apart from the motives of the framers
of such documents. And Ideal Ward used to say, with one of his big
laughs, that those reforming fellows richly deserve to have anyone escape
from their clutches if, in simple decency, he could manage it.

I am interested to find that you like so much those little books of
Father Roche's. He was, you know, at one time a close friend of
Father Tyrrell's. His is a fine, delicate mind, and his books bear the
impress of it.

Mr. Thorold I, of course, know well ; he has been most kind and
useful about this new edition of my big book, and will accordingly be
warmly thanked in my new Preface. He is seeing the book through
the press as its chief proof-reader. But, though I cannot help feeling
flattered at this kind thought of coming over to you and lecturing on my
Philosophy, I found myself compelled not to accept the generous offer.
The facts are that I felt, simply for myself, that to accept being lectured
on in one's lifetime is hardly modest ; and then again, I have never
written for the public at large, and I am most anxious that nothing I
ever write should be pushed. Let these poor things go down and take
root and produce fruit, if and where and when the God Who is so kind
to the birds and to the plants cares to bless them to this degree.

As to Mr. Thorold's Edinburgh Review article upon me, I feel that
I am hardly the person to say anything about it ; but I see two things
plainly enough : one big thing, that he has done his work very carefully
and most generously ; and the other is that on one point he has, probably
quite through my fault, mistaken what I mean. He writes as though
I held that all souls of all men in all times and places, except through
their own fault, are possessed of a genuine sense of God as such. Now,
mysterious though it be that the facts prevent my holding it, yet the
facts as I know them most certainly do. I have nowhere, as far as I
know, articulated such a doctrine, and certainly, for the last thirty years
at least, it has never been part and parcel of my mind. What I do hold
is something very distinct from this. I have the general principle in
my head that we are influenced by realities of all kinds, however finite
and fleeting, in all sorts of manners and ways, quite apart from our
consciousness of these influences, and still more, far more, than our
right articulation and interpretation of these our experiences : and this
principle I apply also and in a sense above all other realities to God.
Although I do not think that all men are clearly aware of His Presence,
and although still fewer are capable of articulating this dim consciousness
directly, yet these same men may very well present to the observer, who

364 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

is himself fully aware of that great ultimate fact, sufficiently clear traces
of the influence of that reality in those other souls. Then I was sur-
prised to find that Mr. Thorold carefully drove home the fact that at
least primitive Buddhism is without any conviction or idea of God.
I thought I had in my Eternal Life made it quite clear that I was fully
aware of the fact and that, at the same time, I thought I could actually
use it as so much evidence in favour of my general contention. I still
think that a downright observation on the part of those Buddhists as to
the sickening character of all mere change, that their longing for Nirvana,
for the complete cessation of all consciousness such as theirs, thus pene-
trated with a sense of mere change and hence of pure desolation, I think
that this is quite magnificent as a prolegomenon of all religion. I take
it to my mind quite simply as one of the most striking effects of the
Real Presence of God also in those men's minds. It is because they
have the dim, inarticulate sense of what the Abiding means that the mere
slush of change is so sickening, a change not of growth, not of full
establishment in Faith and Light, but a sheer racket ; something fairly
like what the evening newspapers of our most enlightened times tend
to produce in the minds of their unhappy devotees.

And finally, as to the Bible. I trust that you will not neglect the
Apocrypha, or what I much prefer to call the Deutero-Canonical Books.
Surely the First Book of the Maccabees is a magnificent piece of heroic
religious history, and the first part of the Book of Wisdom where -is
there anything more beautiful in the Bible before you come to the New
Testament ? And Tobit, in spite of Luther's violent abuse, remains a
sweet and darling book. Even Tobit strikes me always as really more
helpful than, say, the Canonical Book of Esther.

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HiiGEL

(pp. S. B.).

This reminds me of Thekla's most sensible Mother Prioress, who
always speaks with much irritation of the way in which the Irish
Members of the British House of Commons used year after year to
oppose the Government Inspection of Convents. She was sure, she
said, of two things that the substance of the life they were leading was
sincere, wholesome, and truly supernatural, and why should not anyone
and everybody who cared to do so, come and look at it whenever they
chose ? They might possibly end by seeing it in its true colours. And
then again, she was equally certain that nuns are not always wise or
experienced in matters of health of different sorts, and hence that such
Government Inspections would often be useful to them.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 365

To Professor dement Webb

Feb. 21, 1923.

I find that that death 1 and all it has involved for me has been a very
big thing even merely physically. The arterial pressure has been
worse, and now asthma has come to drive me out of bed into an armchair
at night. I have now the strongest instinct that, if only I can drop any
bigger undertakings outside of this house for awhile, I shall get very
fairly fit again, but that otherwise I shall have a most grave breakdown.

This means, alas, that I must beg to be excused from coming to
Oxford to read Professor Troeltsch's lecture on March gth. Of course
you shall have the English translation at least three days before its use,
and if, on revising the translation, I find some especially obscure or
characteristic points, I propose to write a little note on the matter, which
perhaps you would kindly read out to your audience before you begin
the paper. . . .

Please tell Mrs. Webb how sorry I am not to be able to come and
see the pretty new house. I mind much not getting talks with you
both ; but Providence looks after one and it is now quite plain that
I am not meant to go to you.

To a Lady

March 27, 1923.

I am very sorry to be so long in answering your charming letter
about St. Catharine of Genoa. This comes simply from my being
driven, to the degree of ruining my nights ; besides, I wanted first to
recover my bundle of papers and pictures accumulated with regard to
her, to see if I could find anything of the kind you want. I have just
done so, and, to my regret, I only find things you have got already,
the portrait you have in the Mystical Element, and then the small
photograph of the other picture, which I cannot give away, and which,
besides, you would hardly care for. I did possess, for a while, little
packets of dust taken out of her shrine, and one of these I would have sent
you, but they have evidently been distributed long ago. Then I had
little books for the Novena, performed fairly frequently in Genoa still
before her feast, but these booklets also have all gone, nor need you be
too sorry, for everything characteristic of her has there disappeared,
although the exhortations are certainly most sound and wholesome.

I shall allow myself, very soon, to send you the new Preface to
the forth-coming Second Edition of the Mystical Element. The book

1 Of'Troeltsch.

366 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

itself remains as you have it, but the new Preface you may like to preserve
within it ; it is entirely new. And with this Preface I shall send a
copy of the portrait you already possess, with a little inscription to your-
self. This you may like to have framed, or to use, of course in whatever
other way you may prefer.

Please do not allow your friend's report as to the utter oblivion into
which the shrine has fallen in Genoa to over-impress you. I was
present myself during her feast and the fair connected with it just outside
the Hospital Church, in the Tribune of which her relics still repose.
True, not one in five thousand of that crowd knew anything whatsoever
of her special doctrines, but, in their rough, simple way, they loved her,
and loving her made them love God and Christ, and that, depend upon
it, completely satisfies the Saints. The nuns, too, of the Hospital keep
her Shrine and the Altar before it in very good repair, and Mass is often
said there. I repeatedly communicated at those altar-rails, and my
eldest daughter, who to-day would have been forty-six, was married
before that Shrine, in the year 1907.

With many respects and every good wish.

To Henri Garceau

May 29, 1923-

My very dear Henry, .Why this is indeed splendid ! I am quite
particularly glad that you should have gained the Montague prize for
German Literature and Language : because the subject is one that is
again becoming very important ; because I know so well from how
early, how natural has been and is your knowledge here ; and because
with this further achievement you will still more largely have yourself
achieved the covering of your expenses at Cambridge. The latter point
will not only be an advantage for your devoted parents, but an influence
operating within you towards a just appreciation of the value of money.
Of course, all money is the result of toil on the part of someone even
though it be a someone centuries ago. But we remember this better
if we have seen the money being earned, as I saw mine being earned by
my Grandfather, and, better still, if oneself has toiled for it, as you have
now done repeatedly. And the keen competition is proof conclusive
that you achieved this prize through sheer merit. I am very, very glad.
This chest cold is pretty obstinate I am still confined to my bed-
room, and the Doctor gives me no hopes of getting out to Church on
Thursday, alas. But I hope still to be fit for Gilbert and yourself on
Friday and Saturday.

Your affectionate old Friend,

F. v. H.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 367

To Miss I. M. Lea

Jan. 4, 1924.

... I dearly love the Boy Scouts, and, though very naturally
I know less about the Girl Guides, I do not doubt that they also are
a quite excellent institution, hence I can deeply sympathise with your
efforts at starting a centre of them in Dinas Powis.

If only you were a German scholar such as was your Father, in
that case I should give you a book which is giving me deep instruction
and most solid delight. It is by Dr. F. W. Foerster who so condemned
Germany's action in the matter of the Great War as speedily to be seen
across the Bavarian Frontier by the Police of those parts. In his
Jugendseele, Jugendbewegung, jugendziel, published within the last
few months, he has turned away from the mature Germans, whom, for
the most part, he considers to be hopeless in matters of Politics, and has
concentrated upon what is happening among the German equivalents
to our Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. The over 400 pages are really
overflowing with interest, inspiration and instruction. I tell you all
this in hopes that you may know some clerics or others about the country
who would be able and willing to learn a huge lot which, at least,
I myself, turned seventy, and half German, find astonishingly new.

To Professor Clement Webb

Feb. 15, 1924.

Warm thanks for your kindly prompt activity about the Troeltsch
lectures. I write at once, however, not now about that matter, which ~]
will doubtless come to a head before next week is out, but about j
Rashdall.

Of course I knew him personally all those years at the Synthetic
Society. Since then I have but rarely met him, but Archdeacon Lilley?^
at Hereford used to tell me about him whilst he (R.) was a Canon therev
The last time I saw him was outside your then house Holywell Ford,
during my little stay in Oxford for my Hon. D. D. Degree ; it was also
the first time I saw him as Dean of Carlisle.

I can well understand your strong attachment to him and your much
feeling his going. I felt a genuine pang of regret, of real pain when,
last Sunday, I came (quite unexpectedly) upon his death in the Observer.
There was something heroic under all that obtrusively homely tone and
manner a very fine and high kind of Rationalism, ethical through and
through. Where what a man had, and so generously gave, was so very
good of its kind, it readily appears unjust and mean to dwell at all upon
what a man was not. And I dare say that, had I known him when

368 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

I was quite young and if he had been my senior, I should have felt only
his ethical greatness and not his surely strangely great lack of the
specifically religious sense or, at the very least, of the mystical element
of religion. He has established himself permanently in my mind as a
living example of how greatly ethical a soul can be with little of the
specifically religious sense. And this strong impression prevented me
from feeling quite at my ease in his company or even in his books ; for,
after all, he was a Christian cleric, who had deliberately chosen to be one,
so that, quite spontaneously, I would renew my expectation of what was
hardly there.

If only my health gets better again, I intend to study carefully his
big Right and Wrong book, as one of the voices to be discriminated and
located within my new book. But I cannot promise, even to myself
alone, any such thing, depending, as it does, upon my strength, the gift
of God.

You imply, alas, that he suffered greatly at the last. Worthing, as
the death-place, showed me that he must have been away from Carlisle
on leave for a long illness. I can well think of him as heroically resigned.
Ah well, God thus crowned his life by a great opportunity and a special
grace. May we do even distantly as well.

Yours very sincerely,

F. v. HUGEL.

Pray put upon paper for me, sometime, the references to the finest
ethical pages or chapters in his works say, 50 pp. in all.

To Bishop Edward Talbot (dictated}

March 29, 1924.

My very dear Bishop, What a dear sweet letter that was you wrote
me from Rome about Francesco and Eugenia and about the darling
daughter God took from us stunned with grief. And then too about
Padre Genocchi, that fine man whom you recognised in his virile
simplicity. I wish your accounts of Mrs. Talbot had been better ; but
still she must have found a certain gentle pleasure in the very genuine
interest you are finding in things all around you. And may Aquae
have done her good.

Your mention of Perugia gave me a prick of conscience, since I might
have introduced you there to that striking man Don Brizio Casciola, of
whom I can tell you more when we meet.

And when is that to be, I wonder ? I trust soon now. You do not
say whether you really are turning into old Sir Henry Howe's house in
Lexham Gardens ; I hope so, since that is so pleasantly near by.
Hildegard also and my Wife hope this.

My dear Bishop, I dare not dictate on much longer, for you see

VON HOGEL'S LETTERS 369

I have been very very ill. On the 1 8th my Wife thought me so weak
and strange that she had better call in my doctor, arid he found that all
my symptoms said death within a few hours, short of some quite un-
indicated influx of fresh vital strength ; so a trained nurse came in
promptly, and dear fine Father Benedict Zimmerman, that scholarly-
Carmelite, gave me Extreme Unction, and, some two or three hours
later, all the symptoms were somehow reversed, and although I am still
in my bedroom and dressing-gown and can naturally enough do no
regular work, I am, thank God, mending very surely, indeed visibly..
May I use such new strength as may be coming to me with a greatly
increased fidelity and fruitfulness.

Some days before that collapse I saw here Walter Frere for the
first time as Bishop as simple and unspoilt as ever. What a good plan
that is by which he remains a member of his fine Community and, if and
when he retires, finds his place there as before. Your fine Edward must
be very pleased at this arrangement surely a proof in its way that, since
the day when Charles Gore left them, the militant Protestant watch-dogs
have become less keen or are considered more negligible. Well, that
does not break my heart provided it be not a symptom of indifference,,
which surely is worse than many a more irritating stupidity.
I am, my dear Bishop,

Your ever affectionate and grateful old friend,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Mrs. Lillie

March 29, 1924.

Pray forgive me for being so late in thanking you for your kind and!
interesting letter, and, indeed, for leaving you so many months without
any sign of life My excuse must be that not only have I striven to
utilise every scrap of strength available for the getting on of my book,
but also that, ever since before Christmas, I have felt unusually weak
in psychic and brain force. Indeed some ten days ago my Wife found
me most strangely feeble, and she called in my Doctor who at once
discovered that all the vital symptoms were acutely wrong ; he could
not doubt that, unless the quite unindicated new access of vital strength
were to come promptly, I must die within the next few hours ; so a
trained nurse came in at once, and that fine scholarly Carmelite, Father
Benedict Zimmerman, a much admired priest-friend, came and gave me
Extreme Unction. I was quite unconscious of what was happening at
the time, and both he and my Wife knew well that that was what 1 wanted
them to do. Within the next two or three hours all was charged and
since then all the symptoms have been remarkably good. Still I am
confined to my bedroom and dressing-gown, and must be careful not to

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370 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

overtax my strength. So you will forgive me, please, if this letter is not
only belated but dull as well.

There is just one little set of details I should like to put down :
The names of two authors who have come up before me. The one is
Madame Elisabeth Leseur who died in 1913. Her Journal published
after her death by her husband, now a Dominican, is assuredly a very
striking document, the hidden history of a rarely large soul and its
growth into holiness especially under the mixed happiness and suffering
of a marriage full of mutual affection but bereft of unity in faith. And
then, later on, the husband, a very distinguished and attractive type of
Sceptic, conies to the fulness of his wife's faith through the study of her
journey. What I particularly love in the book is the wonderful com-
bination, both in her and then in him, of an ardent, all-transfiguring faith
with the rarest generosity of judgment concerning even the most militant
of the unbelievers amidst whom she habitually lived. I suspect that
her Lettres a des Incroyants and Lettres sur la Souffrance must also be
very fine, but certainly this Journal (together with the In Memoriam
published with it) is a very rare book.

Then I have been much pleased with this new edition made straight
from the manuscript of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, that
noble 1 4th Century book, by an elder confrere of Thomas a Kempis,
not doubtless quite so deep and delicate as Thomas but astonishingly
sane and sage, a classic in its way. The book has been hopelessly out
of print for some thirty years now, and, so far as I know (I am no
specialist as regards this author), Mrs. Stuart Moore has done her work
very thoroughly. I remember how some thirty years ago your American
Archbishop Keane, when we had him in Rome, used to recommend the
book. He had formed himself upon it primarily.

As I sit in my armchair, cut off largely from study and unable to be
very detailed even in prayer, my mind roams often out away in your parts,
full of affectionate memories concerning what you have done and strive
to do and full of good will and best wishes for that fine man, your
husband, and those attractive young creatures, your children. How
pleasant if you could come again amongst us for a bit, but even without
such visible presence we can keep the memory and image of our friends
very near to our mind and active recollection.

Yours in cordial sincerity,

F. v. HUGEL.

From Miss Adrienne Tuck

April 29, 1924.

Dear Professor Webb, Baron von Hugel has asked me to write
to you and thank you for your very kind letter, and to say how sweet

VON HUGEL'S LETTERS 371

and dear he thinks it is of you and your Wife to care for his state of
health. He always thinks of you as among the truest, kindest, and most
solid helps .on earth and would have liked to have dictated in detail a
proper letter, but trusts that you will forgive him for merely instructing
me roughly as to what to say.

Professor Moberley was quite right in telling you that the Baron had
been very ill. Throughout February and the first half of March he
had somehow been losing ground and getting weaker with his heart,
nerves and brain, and by March 1 8 reached a state of unconsciousness
which greatly alarmed his Wife and which the Doctor found to point
in every way to death within the next two or three hours. Father
Benedict Zimmerman, that fine scholarly Carmelite, gave him Extreme
Unction, and both he and the highly skilled nurse, who had been called
in at once, did not believe he would survive long ; but somehow within
the next two or three hours all the symptoms had changed and a fresh
supply of strength was given, although there had been nothing to indicate
it would come. Since then he has been slowly getting better, but he is
still in his bedroom, arranged now downstairs, and his next-door study
in his dressing-gown, and remains fit for very little. He has started
to-day for the first time again his book dictation, and so it comes about
that, after an hour of that, he has asked me to write to you for him.

He is delighted to think that you have both had so interesting and
profitable a time in Rome, with the Pope himself, with Mussolini, with
Gentile, and have come away with details and facts about all three.

He thanks you for your kind thoughts and prayers for him and trusts
that you will kindly continue them. His great hope is to be allowed
to go on with and finish his book, but that is a large order and will
require the continuance of growing and settled strength on a larger
scale than has been granted him so far.

He bids me send you both his warmest thanks and to say that he
daily remembers you before God.

Yours sincerely,

ADRIENNE TUCK,

Secretary.

To Mr. Cecil Chapman
(on his retirement from his London Magistracy)

Aug. 13, 1924.

I am thinking of you as now on your way to your last Court sitting,
and am feeling how indecent it would be if I did not utter a single word
to you of all the sympathy, respect, admiration, and gratitude which
one side or element after another in your devoted labours of so many
years have evoked and have fixed within my mind and spirit in watching

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372 VON HUGEL'S LETTERS

your character, your work, and their manifold effects. I fear the critics
would feel that to be a " German " sentence ; but I am only conscious
of requiring some such form to remain quite sincere in my warm
appreciation, because, after all, I know, or can judge of, only part of
your work, and because not all of this part is di reedy sympathetic to me.
Yet, even in such instances, I can and do respect the courage and
unworldliness of your intrepid advocacies, and can but trust' that they
will not prevent some handsome official (government) recognition of
this your general character and spirit, and of the numerous and valuable
reforms introduced by yourself, and the wide and deep stream of
kindness proceeding from you towards the "just and the unjust,"
especially the " unjust," during half a century at least.

I think, of course, especially of your work for First Offenders, and
all its admirable starting and supervision, such as Miss Lance has revealed
it to me, and indeed also of your personal kindness, of the most valuable
sort, shown by you so steadily to this fine, lonely, much tried spirit.
And yet I feel certain, all the time, that these things are, after all, only
specimens of what you have done and of what, with God's help, you
are.

May you not feel too much the disappearance from your life of the
Court work, and may the volunteer activities gain still further in
attraction and interest so as largely to make up for what you have now
to abandon.

Yours in cordial interest and affectionate sympathy.

To Mrs. Bernard Holland 1

Sept. 8, 1924.

Your husband, on my asking him, told me he felt sure you would
like a little letter of sympathy from me with your two sacrifices differing
each from the other, yet both real sacrifices. I can claim to know what
these sacrifices mean, for I, like you, was called upon by God to give
one daughter to Him in the Cloister and another daughter in the
married state. On each occasion I felt the risk would they be happy
in the state to which each was solemnly pledging herself ? I felt, too,
the change in and for the family and for myself, a change, even if it
were a good change, and I do not like changes. And so on. But
in both cases God's blessing was at work, and we kept seeing that it
was ; especially has the vocation to the cloister shown itself fruitful and
peace-bringing to us all.

1 This letter was written on the day on which our eldest daughter, Verena, at the
end of her novitiate, made her First Vows in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart, Roe-
hampton. Her sister, Sibylla, was married nine days later in Westminster Cathedral.

VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS 373

Certainly, with your Verena also, everything conspires to show how
unforced, how genuine is her call. And, given this genuineness, your
acceptance of it will assuredly bring you blessings, and this even if you
are hardly aware of more than imperfections in your acceptance.

As to your Sibylla, I feel as though the risks were less than they were
with our Gertrud, in so far as your daughter is so markedly younger
than was ours when she married, and how far more easy it is to get into
each other's ways in the early twenties than in the late thirties. Nor is
it as if your daughter were flighty or over-impressionable ; she is evidently
so strong and sensible, calm and self-knowing a young woman distinctly
a woman, not a child.

It is, of course, very certain that some obscurity, some anxiety there
must be in every human action of a manifoldness such as is such a
linking of two lives into one. But we can, and with God's grace we
will, accept and sanctify the obscurity as a means towards bringing on
the clearness in their oneness of life and in our perception of it. I am
praying my little best for Verena to-day and will pray my best for
Sibylla on her wedding-day.

I love to think of you in your home.

To G. G.

All Saints Eve.

Look up, look up with me to-morrow ! Oh, what a glorious,
touching Company ! It is the Feast of every heroic soul, every heroic
act inspired by God since man began on Earth. How our little earthly
years are fleeing by. Pindar called our life " the dream of a shadow,"
yet in it and through it, if we but watch and pray, and work and
suffer and rest in God, our Home, we can find Eternity that will
never pass away.

To Mrs. Sharp (Widow of William Sharp)

Dec. 23, 1924.

My very dear Cousin Elizabeth, You are right indeed in thinking
that Mary and I must have been wondering, a bit anxiously, as to what
was becoming of you, since the time of your settling in for the winter
for this winter had clearly gone by, and this, without a word to tell us
how you were, where you were, whether we were still keeping the
eager, all too rare spirit of Cousin Elizabeth amongst the toil and moil of
here below. We have, however, an excellent circumstance continuing
amongst the blessings of your life the persistence in life and being of

374 VON HttGEL'S LETTERS

your devoted, excellent brother, Dr. Farquharson Sharp : we can feel
sure that, so long as he is left to live here below, he will inform your
closer belongings and friends as to what has become of you, and when
you are unable to do so yourself. There was no such communication
from him, so all must be relatively right ; and our patience would
still be rewarded by news directly from your dear self.

It is true, alas, that you have not much good news to give us. I so
wish your Scottish time had done more for you, that you could have
seen us when, since then, you passed again through London, and that
you could have again settled in the Isle of Wight. Still, I feel we can
really trust to your having, in Hove, quarters in some respects better
suited to your leg-requirements : may this indeed prove true.

Mary will now already have told you, I expect, about our own
health and other doings. I indeed wish we had not, all of us, every-
where in N. W. Europe, to bear with that strangely obstinate wet weather
which pursued us through August up to now with the most trying
persistency ; to have the weather like that now is natural enough,
but to have had it like that before was indeed a trial. The Doctor
thought it better for me not to run the risks of lodgings etc. at all ; and
so I remained here, very comfortable as regards my quarters which
never pall upon me. But how one longed for the good bath-chairman to
come round for one not in and for a soup a pea soup, as it would persist
in being.

I am sorry to say that this same weather almost entirely prevented
Mary from getting away at all a matter in all her life so much more
trying for her than it has been for me. But the house has continued
to prove the God-send it has been all along so airy, so warm in winter
and cool in summer, so get-at-able for friends, so easy to get from for
anything when one is at all fit !

I am happy to say that my working health has kept fair upon the
whole. I have been able to move on to where I can now see the end
as not yet in my hands, but certainly as markedly nearer. Just now,
I have started a little fortnight's complete holiday complete from all
composition-work. I find the difficulty to lie in how to evade additional
tiringness from more than now usual correspondence, and yet not utterly
to neglect letter-writing, the divinely intended and specially blest means
and price of such most precious touch with our friends.

You will have seen that I have been losing a for me quite new friend
in Sir Archibald Geikie, that most touchingly self-disciplined old patri-
arch. I failed in seeing him, indeed my first and only long letter came
too late for more than a note from him ; but how sweet and human,
how out-ward looking and still busy with helping himself and others to
grow, it was ! And now the home-child, Miss Lucy Gardner, writes
to me so sweetly about her great loss.

VON HttGEL'S LETTERS 375

I have been wondering what to give you for Christmas : I hope
you will like what I send you, The Little Silent One, a. collection of
genuine African (Negro) Animal Fairy Stories which somehow soothe
and brace me they appeal to and satisfy the perennial child present and
more or less awake amongst us all. May I have chosen right ! How
we long you may be much better again by next Easter.

With dear and deep love, in which Hillie joins most warmly,

Your very affectionate old cousin,

F. VON HUGEL.

To Mrs. Cecil Chapman

Dec. 29, 1924.

My very dear Adeline, This morning a most kind letter from
Mildred, for which I am especially grateful to her, brought me the news
brought to us both the news of your Silver Wedding to-morrow !
And so you were married to " Cousin Cecil " as far back as Dec. 30, 1 899
who would believe this ? We are however most glad to be thus given
the chance of joining the others of those who know and love you,
indeed who belong to you especially closely ; for, indeed, since when
is it that we know you ? As to Mary, I even now know only that she,
already in the early summer of 1873, knew you well enough gladly to go
abroad with you alone for quite a number of weeks. I cannot, as to
myself, recollect the particular day on which, no doubt in late October
or early or middle November 1873, I first got to know you. Yet it
was very natural that you and Mary being such comfortable, tested
friends together, I should have felt you as a friend of my own also
already then. And then is over 50 years ago, with how much of history
that has come to stay since then, in our own lives, with those specially
dear to us, and with the world at large, especially our poor old Western
Europe.

But a ground for special gratitude to God will to-morrow be, of
course, what the union of you two has brought of good to yourselves and
your relatives and close friends. I do not find it at all necessary to
agree with all our friends' enthusiasms in order still to find so much,
so very much, one thanks God for their having done and taught us all.
But indeed the ceaseless cataract of kindness and helpfulness now long,
most rightly, identified with your man's name, how in no wise has it been
hampered by you ! Each has, I think, at times somewhat over-stimu-
lated the other how forgiveable, how unescapable a fault ! I love so
to think that neither of you will be lacking subjects for love and work,
for service; we shall have, as we look on, to restrain ourselves from adding
too much fuel of our own !

376 VON HtTGEL'S LETTERS

On looking about for some characteristic little present for you, I
was delighted at finding myself pulled up before a further little book
this one only just out by Dr. Albert Schweitzer the author of On
the Edge of the Primaeval Forest this one being Memoirs of Child-
hood and Touth. A copy reached me from my ever-giving Professor
Kemp Smith ; but I felt sure I should find a copy for you handy at
Messrs. W. H. Smith's Bookshop this afternoon. No ! but they will
get it ... you shall have it all right. I find it deeply interesting !

Once more then our joint deep affection, interest, appreciation,
gratitude, to you both, with our warmest wishes and fervent prayers
to-morrow.

Your affectionate old Friend,

F. v. HUGEL.

377

INDEX OF CORRESPONDENTS

Bevan, Edwyn, 232

Brilioth, Dr. Y., 294, 303

Champneys, Basil, 69

Chapman, Cecil, 371

Chapman, Mrs. Cecil, 375

Connell, J. M., 203

Drew, Mrs. Henry, 70, 125, 170, 178

a Friend in last illness, 226, 227, 228,
230

G. G. (a niece), 257, 266, 267, 269, 270,
274, 278, 279, 284, 286, 287, 289, 298,
299 3o, 302, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308,
309 3*4> 3i6, 323, 329, 337, 340, 345,
373

Garceau, Henri, 226, 235, 240, 249, 341,
366

Gardner, Edmund, 165

Gardner, Prof. Percy, no, 115, 117

a Girl on her Confirmation, 351

Guiran, Prof. Rene, 333

Handley, Rev. H., 252

Hdbert, Abbe Marcel, 100, 103, 105

Heiler, Prof. Friedrich, 318

Hodgson, Miss, 358

Holland, Bernard, 207, 208, 263, 269, 331,

35
Holland, Mrs. Bernard, 372

Houtin, Abb6 Albert, 121, 134

J.M. (a young girl), 175, 180, 188, 193,

321

Johnston, Leslie, 213
Lacey, Rev. Canon, 358

a Lady (i), 187

a Lady (ii), 344, 345, 348

a Lady (iii), 365

Lea, Miss I. M., 367

Lillie, Mrs. ,300, 312, 341, 352, 354, 360,

369

Lloyd Thomas, Rev. J. M., 209
Lyall, Lady, 190
Montefiore, Claude, 238, 249
Newsom, Rev. Canon, 166, 191, 192,200,

211, 225, 242, 293, 351
Petre, Miss Maude, 82, 88, 99, 109, 139,

155, 161, 168, 171, 179, 182, 183, 185,

199, 2O2, 205, 2O8, 2IO, 212, 215, 221,

246, 247, 251, 355
Quin, Malcolm, 172
Ritchie, Lady, 198
Sharp, Mrs., 373

Sonnenschein, Prof. E. A., 232, 262
Talbot, Bishop Edward, 176, 217, 220,

241, 244, 245, 255, 279, 282, 368
Tadow, Rev. Tissington, 264, 295
Tyrrell, Father George, 71, 74, 76, 77,

85> 8 7> 97> 102, 113, 124, 125, 127, 129,

I32> *35 *36, 138. i4i> i43> *44> *47>

148, 151, 152, 153, 157, 162
Wane, Rev. Frank, 253, 255
Webb, Prof. Clement, 137, 145, 155, 157,

163, 171, 181, 194, 195, 196, 236, 256,

282, 292, 297, 325, 327, 359, 365, 367,

37
Webb, Mrs. Clement, 243, 309

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